v0.3.0

The valley got a shop you walk into, a flock and a herd in the meadows, a lake that sits up a hillside holding its own water, mountains with snow on their shoulders, and a population that is written down rather than whatever fell out of the spawning. Forty-one commits since v0.2.0, nearly all of them from playing it on a phone and reporting what looked wrong.

A shop, and things to save for

The shop could not be opened at all. The panel was written the day the animals were, the prices were checked, the close button worked — and nothing in the whole game ever opened it, so a child could earn coins for a week and never spend one. It is a place now: a green-boarded gabled barn 455 m north-east, with a porch on posts, display windows, a shingled roof, a weather vane, five lamps on the ceiling and somebody in an apron behind the counter. Five bicycles and two motorcycles stand on its floor as the same meshes a child rides, and the small goods are out on stands and on four shelves behind the counter.

Its shelf is pictures and prices and no words at all: tap a picture and it says what the thing is and what it is for, press buy to buy it. It scrolls, which the old list did not — five things fitted and the rest ran off the bottom of the screen with no way to reach them.

Nine things for sale, in price order: chocolate 1, bottle 19, axe 29, shears 39, lantern 49, whistle 59, saddle 79, bicycle 99, motorcycle 299. Chocolate is the first thing here that is used up rather than owned; wool is the first thing the shop buys rather than sells.

A motorcycle, a saddle, and machines that look like machines

The motorcycle is the fastest thing in the valley and the best climber — steeper ground than a horse with a saddle on — and everything within thirty metres leaves while its engine is running. That is the whole trade: you get there first and there is nothing there when you arrive. The engine is synthesised like every other sound here: fifty-four firings a second, three gears that the note climbs, drops and climbs again through, rising in pitch and loudness as the machine pulls away.

The saddle is the opposite kind of purchase — it makes the map bigger rather than the journey shorter, because a horse under one takes banks it would otherwise slide off.

Both machines were rebuilt from silhouettes into things: one spoked wheel shared between them, a diamond frame with chainstays, cranks and pedals and a bell on the bicycle; mudguards, a finned barrel, a tank with a stripe, mirrors, an exhaust and a kickstand on the motorcycle. Their wheels were also turned a quarter turn, standing across the frame like roundabouts, which nobody had noticed.

Sheep, cows, and a counted valley

A hundred sheep and fifty cows graze the meadows. A sheep offers itself only to somebody carrying shears and gives a fleece worth four coins at the shop; a cow gives milk, drunk where you stand, worth a third of a child's legs. Neither pays coins, and both take a minute or two to be ready again.

The populations are written down now rather than fallen into. They were a ladder of chances typed into the spawning and what came out was five hundred squirrels and two hundred dogs — so many that a child tripped over coins and the shop stopped being something to save for. Today: squirrels 300, sheep 100, cows 50, cats 50, dogs 50, beavers 30, horses 20, ducks 10, and a check counts the whole map and fails if it drifts.

There was one beaver in the entire valley. Their rule asked for ground within fourteen metres of a river thirty-two metres across, so every point it accepted was riverbed, and riverbed is under water and thrown away a line earlier. A rule that contradicts itself does not fail; it quietly produces nothing.

The lake up the hill

Both ponds were dug straight down to the world's waterline wherever they lay, because the water in this valley is one flat plane at zero. The eastern one lies on a shoulder of hill thirteen metres up, and what was there was a crater forty metres across with water in the bottom and banks too steep to climb.

A pond has a water level of its own now, its bed two metres below that level, and twenty-five metres of level beach half a metre above the water right round it, so whichever way a child swims they come out onto something flat. Swimming starts three strides from the shore.

The consequence was that nothing may assume where the water is any more. Swimming, wading, a horse's draught, a boat's float, where a mount may go, how deep a child is submerged, where trees and stones and horses may be, whether a ladder may be built, what the map paints blue, what colour the ground is and whether a football is wet — all of them measured against the sea, and all of them now ask the water where it is.

Mountains, and the ground underfoot

Snow covered 28% of the ground above the snowline: it was cut off at a steepness of 0.42, and the high ground here averages 0.85, so five sixths of every mountain was bare. Snow holds to about forty degrees and slides off past fifty, and those are the numbers now — 69% of the high ground white, 29% carrying glacier ice, and not one cliff white, which is the contrast a mountain is made of. The rule lived in two files with different numbers in them; it is one function now.

The terrain mesh is built by a different code path from the one that answers "how high is the ground here", and that path still had the old arithmetic in it: the lake's water sat metres above its own bank because the bank was still the wall of the old crater. The check that compares the two had sampled three corners of empty valley, where nothing is carved and the two agree perfectly. It samples over every pond and every levelled place now.

Riding

A wood is solid to a horse. What the world could touch was the child's own capsule, a third of a metre across, whatever they were sitting on — so a rider passed neatly to one side of a trunk while the horse under them went straight through it. A rider also no longer hangs above the saddle going downhill, is not shaken to pieces at speed (anything with a wheelbase rides the average of the ground under its ends), and is never set down inside the hillside that just refused it.

Twenty horses are turned out across the valley on the golden angle, grazing with their heads down — and grazing, on its first attempt, threw every horse's head back over its own withers to stare at the sky. The angle was the right size and the wrong way round; the check read back the same number the code had written and passed.

The playground, the café and the path

The swing is pumped rather than wound up. Each push adds to the arc up to a limit short of the bar, and a swing pumped to the top runs for a minute — it used to set a three-second timer and give the same arc however many times you pushed. Pushing the stick gets you off.

The café's terrace stood two and a half metres from its own front door with the umbrellas over the way in; it is a café's length out now. Moving it broke the reach that decides whether a child may order, which had been a number written beside the tables.

The path from the lake to the shop winds: a hundred and eighty-five metres to cover sixty-nine, because the shop stands on a plateau above a cliff and every straight line to it climbs ground at a gradient of one. A painted path up a wall is worse than no path.

The icon

The launcher icon was a flat ridge on a blue gradient. It is this valley now, in the colours the game actually paints with: pale peaks with snow, a darker ridge, a wood drawn with teeth along its top, a bright meadow, the river running towards you and a horse on the near slope. Composing it turned up that the sun and the horse both sat outside the circle an adaptive icon is masked to — on a round launcher the sun would have been clipped and the horse cut away entirely.

Licence

The code is AGPL-3.0 rather than GPL-3.0, and the name, the application id, the icon and the visual identity are reserved and not licensed — see NOTICE.md. Fork it under your own name and your own icon and you are welcome.

Also

Ducks on the ponds that give nothing and want nothing. Chocolate you can eat anywhere. A switch on the lantern. The ride button shows what you are getting on rather than a horseshoe for everything. A cat that walked into the lake walks out again. Grass and stones and boulders no longer grow through the floors of buildings. Roofs come off while you are under them, in the café as well as the shop. Sheep and cows have voices — a bleat is the wobble, a moo is the length — and a check now holds every animal to having all of the half-dozen things an animal here needs.

The APK below is a debug build, signed with a debug key: Android will warn about installing it, which is expected.