Below is gameplay video of a prototype of the puzzle game “Draak” that I am working on. Draak will be an iPad-only iOS game; the prototype below is written to Windows in C# on top of MonoGame.

The initial idea for this game was about the art. I thought it would be cool to make a game that looks like an animated version of one of M. C. Escher’s tessellations, particularly one that involves a similarity symmetry. So I lifted mechanics from a 1990s era game that I always felt was a good game trapped in the typical square lattice for which it was particularly ill-suited. The old game’s Euclidean lay-out wasted a lot of space.

A lot of the work in the above may not be immediately apparent (which is good I think). Specifically, there are actually two shapes of butterflies in the above not just one. They look like this:

and are arrayed as in a checkerboard with a 90 degree rotation applied to cells of opposite parity — the geometry might be clearer here in which I create these butterfly tiles unadorned with my tool EscherDraw (before I had beziers working in EscherDraw) Thus any time a butterfly moves to a cell with opposite parity I need to not only handle the scale and rotation tweening imposed by the spiral lattice, I also have to simulatenously do the 90 degree rotation imposed by the butterfly tiles and simultaneously morph the actual sprites above from one to the other.

I created the above sprites as vector art using tile outlines exported from Escher draw as SVG and wrote a Python script that morphs SVG as the publically available software for morphing vector graphics is surprisingly non-existent. I am going to post about my vector morphing code here soon, I just need to clean it up for use by people other than me.