I've this. It reminds me so much of the type of little experiments that people would create in Flash in the early 2000s.
It's a real shame there isn't the equivalent combination of development/graphics/animation/distribution that flash allowed. The creativity it enabled was outstanding and so accessible to get started (pirated copies were so ubiquitous). It had such a shallow learning curve. I kind of long for a return of that type of tool.
Thanks everyone for checking it out and for all the nice comments and feedback. Seeing this do well here was a really fun (and surprising) way to wake up this morning. Cheers!
Lovely effect! I like that you can also draw fireworks, and the sheer number of settings beyond that is really neat. Nice job.
My head has been in North American airspace today, so I admit I thought by the domain name that this might be a community effort to gather ideas of conceptual aircraft designs from a certain $9B secret project.
I feel like these little "safe, relaxing spaces" online are starting to become more of a trend?
I know it's not exactly the same, but conceptually, https://viberooms.serenebase.com/ this is something I have bookmarked as inspiration for some software I'm planning. My intent was to create a calming, safe space to check in and to use that space as a meditation and journaling area. Now I feel like I'm seeing these "serene for the sake of being serene, potentially with extra purpose tacked on" environments everywhere! Is it a bit of a trend or am I falling prey to the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon once again? :)
Anyway. Aurora is quite lovely. I wanted more from it, but was happy with what I got, too. The fireworks were especially nice. I wish it were easier to swap between controls so that I could fire a flurry of various colors of fireworks while the aurora was going.
Personally I find the styling in the link you posted sub-par to be 'serene'. These are the first I noticed, for what my n=1 is worth.
I think VR could (some day) work very well for this too. I like the idea of a virtual cabin on a snowy mountain to chill or explore from. Coding in VR doesn't seem to be really there yet but getting there. To work from home but virtually somewhere from a zenful space with magnificent view sounds interesting too.
Hi - DrawAurora creator here -- thank you for the kind words and good feedback! I'm not sure if this is what you were looking as far as easier swapping of controls, but I did add some keyboard shortcuts. You can check them out by hitting the ? on the bottom right.
- I had to search fairly hard to find the ?. I did find it because I wanted to find it, but maybe have icons that haven't been touched one flash or something.
- I wish the fireworks made a launching sound. There is no instantaneous feedback when I first press the button and it makes me feel like I am doing something wrong, but then, later, fireworks!
- Not sure the right approach, but the animation loop is done with RAF and the music isn't paused when the tab becomes inactive. This means that when I come back, the music has been continually playing, but the aurora and fireworks were frozen and my immersion is damaged a bit.
- I don't find the zoom action to be especially meaningful.
- I would strongly prefer changing the color to only affect fireworks which have not yet launched rather than affecting those already shown.
It's a real shame there isn't the equivalent combination of development/graphics/animation/distribution that flash allowed. The creativity it enabled was outstanding and so accessible to get started (pirated copies were so ubiquitous). It had such a shallow learning curve. I kind of long for a return of that type of tool.