“But Tom, what does this have to do with a game about stopping an alien invasion?”

Keeping track of installed applications on multiple computers is a hassle.

Homebrew had been great for installing command line tools and libraries on macOS. Using Chocolatey on my Windows machine inspired me to take things a step further and try the “cask” subcommand for installing desktop Mac apps as well.

brew cask install firefox blender handbrake vlc

Works great. It’s now really easy to keep all the apps updated. Setup on a new computer is very quick. I also found that Tiny Player for Mac already had an entry in Homebrew:

brew cask install tiny-player

Thanks to whoever added it.

I started playing around with MagicaVoxel a while ago. I’m not going to use it for Devastro 2 but I can imagine some city simulation game using graphics made this way: tiny & cute with great lighting. It constrains things in a way I would be happy to work with.

As part of my Blender practice session, I tried to re-create the icon of Sketch.

Here’s the original:

I found two different shapes that could match this image in an orthographic view.

One:

Two:

And a third shape with a flat top if we use a perspective camera and level it vertically with the mid section of the object:

To match the lighting I used a big front light and two emissive surfaces at the bottom and top. I skipped the highlighted edges to save time.

Final render:

And a little spinning GIF as a bonus: