Turbo Pudding
Lulla, her ten sleepy friends, the lily pads and the Moon in Lullalotl aren’t picture files. They’re all drawn by code, line by line, every frame. That means the sketchbook for this game is mostly a list of small rules. This Sunday, here are the ones that make a critter look soft enough to hug.
Every friend is a recipe
Each friend is written down as a short recipe: a body shape, ears, eyes, cheeks, a mouth, maybe a tail, a few extras and a voice. Pip is a green bean with bunny ears and a leaf hat. Bun, the valley baker, gets a crust, an apron with dots, a cookie and crumbs. Leap is a flying squirrel crossed with a tree frog, with a green cape and a fan of a tail.
Mix the same few pieces differently and you get the whole cast, all clearly from one pond.
Five soft shapes
There are only five body shapes. Round is the plainest: Lulla, Twinkle, Echo and Puff. Bean is wider at the bottom, like a gumdrop, for Pip, Leap and each of the twins Tik and Tok. Drop has a soft point on top, for Prism, a fox kit crossed with a dragonfly.
The other two have a bit of character built in. Loaf is wide and low, “like a sitting kitten,” as a note in our code puts it, and it suits Dozy and Bun. Blob is Bloop’s shape, and it never sits still: its outline is a ring of points with two slow waves running around it, so Bloop jiggles a little all the time, like jelly.
No black lines
A black outline makes a cartoon look hard, so nobody in Lullalotl has one. Each friend’s outline is its own body color, darkened about halfway toward a deep plum. Pip’s is dark green, Lulla’s a dusty mauve. Even the mouths are drawn in plum, not black.
The body is filled with a soft gradient, lit from the top left: a little lighter there, a little darker at the far edge. A pale oval of belly sits at the bottom, and a soft white shine goes near the top left, like the light on a gummy candy. Pink cheeks go on near the end, half see-through. When a friend sings, the cheeks get rosier.
The eyes do the work
The eyes are dark plum ovals, a bit taller than they are wide, each with two white highlights: a big one at the top left and a small one at the bottom right. A comment in our code says the big one is what makes a friend look cute. Lulla, Leap, Twinkle and Prism get a third tiny sparkle in the middle.
When a friend looks at something, its eyes slide a little toward it. Asleep, each eye becomes a curve that dips like a closed lid. Happy, the curve flips upside down. Singing, the mouth opens into an oval with a small pink tongue, and friends with beaks, like Puff and the twins, open their beaks instead.
Everyone breathes
A pond full of friends standing perfectly still looks like stickers. So every friend breathes. The body grows a little taller and narrower, then a little shorter and wider, and it’s anchored at the bottom so their feet never leave the lily pad.
Everyone blinks, too, and each friend has their own rhythm, somewhere between about three and five and a half seconds. We time it for the end of each rhythm, so at the start, every friend has their eyes open. Tik and Tok sit back to back on one pad and nod in turn, like a pendulum, one swing every four seconds.
The color the Hush leaves behind
In the story, the Hush makes Moonlit Hollow so quiet that the colors fade. To draw that, we paint a friend as usual, off to the side, then lay a gray-blue wash over it. We call that color Hush Slate. The wash covers only the friend, never the pond around them, so a sleeper stays the same shape and just loses its color. That’s how the sleepers look in the opening story. On the map, the friend of a pond you haven’t woken yet dozes gray on the bank, waiting.
Lulla’s crown
Lulla, the only one who stays pink, gets one detail nobody else has. Her frilly gills are a crown of six fronds with ten tiny buds. A bud still waiting is a small gray-blue dot. Every time a pond’s Moon wakes up, one bud lights: it pops a little bigger, then settles into a warm gold twinkle, with a bell note and a puff of stars. The tips light first, top pair to bottom pair, then the middles of the upper fronds. After the tenth, the whole crown glows.
Come and wake them
Lullalotl has ten ponds in Moonlit Hollow, and the first two are free to play in your browser at lullalotl.com. The full game, all ten ponds, is $4.99, paid once. More about the game is on its Lullalotl page.
