I've been trying some new stuff lately:

• Decker. I'd for some reason assumed it was some npm and/or wasm monstrosity, but it turns out it's nice zero-dependency Javascript in a single html file that you can save and run offline! And that's in addition to the native version that uses SDL just like LÖVE. So in some ways Decker has a better cross-platform story than LÖVE, which is non-trivial to run on iOS. The downside: on a web browser on Android it's even less efficient to run than LÖVE's native app.
• Rust. I spent some time playing around with a LÖVE-inspired game engine called ggez, and the much more basic wgpu crate. The promise here: Rust seems to be evolving some pretty nice cross-platform tooling, so in time we may end up with a world where it's easy to cross-compile to any platform. Of course, the compile step is not ideal, but it promises to yield much more efficient binaries that might run on lower-end devices like old phones. The eco-system is not quite there, and the npm-like dependency explosions are rough. But I want to try to look outside my comfort zone. It's possible the way forward isn't unique-snowflake minority platforms like LÖVE or Decker, but just to use a majority platform with better taste, taking the time to understand and curate the landscape of dependencies.

Anyways, here's a little program I made to try to stretch Decker to more of the sort of procedural graphics I tend to gravitate towards on LÖVE:

This is dancing letters, a fixed piece of text except we're constantly switching the case of each letter at random.

Here's the code, to give you a flavor for what Decker's quite elegant mix of Lua and APL looks like:

local s: "abcdef"  # put in whatever text you want

on view do
  if ! 5%sys.frame
    me.clear[]
    local y:each c in s random["%u","%l"] format c end
    local margin:15
    me.text[y margin,margin,me.size-margin*2]
  end
end

And here's that code along with the surrounding card (you need a canvas widget to be present just so) in a less readable form that you can copy and paste into a deck of your own:

%%CRD0{"c":{"name":"home","script":"on view do\n \nend","widgets":{"canvas":{"type":"canvas","size":[300,200],"pos":[48,51],"animated":1,"volatile":1,"script":"local s: \"Call me Ishmael.  Some years ago--never mind how long precisely--having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world.  It is a way I have of driving off the spleen and regulating the circulation.  Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off--then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can.\"\n\non view do\n if ! 5%sys.frame\n  me.clear[]\n  local y:each c in s random[\"%u\",\"%l\"] format c end\n  local margin:15\n  me.text[y (margin,margin,me.size-margin*2)]\n end\nend","border":1,"scale":1}}},"d":{}}

This post is part of my Freewheeling Apps Devlog.

Comments gratefully appreciated. Please send them to me by any method of your choice and I'll include them here.