It has been nearly one month since the release of the Serenity Sketch demo!!

Many many thanks to everyone who has given it a shot, and provided feedback and encouragement to us. It felt especially great to have my (Josh's) first game out there and hear of folks enjoying it.

This update is almost entirely about Guided Mandala Mode, which is the mode that I (again, Josh) use the most consistently and get the most joy out of.

Guided Mandala Mode

• I use the Guided Mandala as a warm-up for my own meditation practice every morning. But after several months of drawing the same 3 mandalas again and again, I decided it was time to add some more variety. So I've drawn an additional 12 mandalas, leaving 5 mandalas each for Simple, Intermediate, and Advanced options = 15 mandalas total!
  • Let me know which are your favorite, and how the difficulty scaling feels.
  • I'm especially interested in the new geometric patterns. They look less flowery, with firm angles instead of curved lines. I drew inspiration from Muslim mandalas, and would love to experiment more along that theme.
• Style-wise, the previous mandala examples looked too 'correct.' It somehow created pressure and comparison between the player's drawing and the perfect example. So I re-drew them, allowing more imperfections, so that the player feels enabled to be imperfect themselves. I like where I landed, but would be curious as to what feelings y'all get from these 'messier' examples. 
• Evaporation curve - both myself and players commented on Guided Mandala paintings disappearing too quickly. So I made some dynamic scaling to the evaporation curve. The result - you'll be able to see your whole mandala painting for the duration of the exercise, yet still notice that it slowly evaporates. 
• Closing Gong - the automatic closing gong was playing too soon after the player stops painting. I added a few more seconds of wait time between final brush stroke, and the gong + closing voice line. I'm still not completely satisfied with the end of the sequence. A couple folks suggested another audio cue, or some visual cue once the player stops painting. I'll experiment with that in a future update.
• Player-Generated Mandalas? I would love to incorporate some creations from players. Can you come up with a mandala design? If so, drop me a comment here, and a link to an image. I'll "redo" it to keep style consistency, and happily credit you in the game.

What I failed at this month

In the spirit of Serenity Sketch and 'everything you paint here belongs here,' I wanted to also share what I tried and failed to do this month. Hope it's encouraging to other creators and players to know that we all fail sometimes, and that's totally okay.

• Firefox optimization. The game still sucks on Firefox (and for some players, on Edge). The frame rate falls through the floor; it's unplayable. I tried reading through the browser profiler, which tells you what code is taking the longest to execute so you can optimize it. But even after lots of googling and even talking to a few other developers, it seems like this is a common bottleneck between Firefox and the specific software language we chose for the prototype, p5.js.
  • If any developers have ideas for further optimization, or would even be willing to look through part of the code, I'd be really grateful. I've already reached the limit of my (limited) knowledge and time budget for this improvement.

What's Next?

• New Painting Mode under development - working name 'Inspired Images'. It's a riff on the first image you see on the stone after starting Serenity Sketch. We'd like the player to receive a launching-off point image - especially useful for those who are intimidated by the completely empty stone.
• This month will be a slow one for game updates, as I need to use my time mostly for 1) applying for grant funding, to improve the game; 2) advertising the existing game

How to stay in the loop?

• Social Media - for now I'll be posting stuff to my personal accounts
  • bsky: joshuaveit@bsky.social
  • twitter/X : @JoshVeit
  • tiktok: joshua.veit.gaming
• Newsletter sign-up - get regular updates from me here
  • https://bit.ly/4fPXKW8
• Discord - if you want to have the biggest impact on the direction of Serenity Sketch, give me direct feedback
  • https://bit.ly/4gNcvKm