• Simple: The experience should be incredibly easy to operate, ideally using only 1 or maybe 2 main buttons in total.
• Beautiful: Every frame should be beautiful, serving as a standalone piece of art from beginning to end without cluttered graphics, metrics, or numbers.
• User control: The user should be able to control as much as possible about the scene they are creating (i.e. reduce randomness)

An ideal feature addition is a feature that increases simplicity, beauty, or user control without detracting from the other two.

• User interface

• Add export tool (this will help with creating animations, also cool to save projects).

• Make a way to save and load maps. It is easy when you only have water/grass because the program can derive the more complex animations from the base heightmap

• Optimize the water calculations to re-calculate only when someone places/delets a block instead of every single frame.

• Further beautify water animations by adding height data for water blocks. The lower a water block is, the less streaks/lines there should be.

• Add more height step animations for waterfall (base, small, medium, large should all be slightly different). I currently have base and small, but small could be better.

• Consider deleting the grid lines for the grass blocks to make it less blocky and more beautiful (should there be an outline on the outside, though?)

• Add water shorelines on the edges of the water where it meets the land

• Dynamic Environment:
  • Consider adding seasons to change the environment dynamically.
  • Implement slow grass growth to simulate an evolving landscape.
  • Add animals
  • Add time of day
• Animations:
  • Implement splash animations for waterfalls that are 3+ blocks high.
  • Make water less grid-like
  • Add moving clouds, flying birds, and other ambient animations to enrich the environment.
  • Using pget and pset, perhaps add some type of shadows based on time of day or clouds passing overhead or even more advanced shadow calculations based on flora or animals.

• Single Player
  • Level system where users have a limited number of blocks to build a scene and as they progress they get access to more and more to build beautiful things
  • Timed challenges where users have x amount of time to build a scene from a given prompt (i.e. "Twin waterfall", "hidden marsh", "secret valley", etc)
  • Have a tutorial flow to introduce users to the game mechanics, showing examples, and showing small 3x3 plots to get basic point across slowly.
  • Art/Zen/Relaxation Mode: Focus on creative expression and relaxation.
• Multiplayer
  • One player manages flora and another manages different aspects, enhancing cooperative gameplay.
  • Race mode where players are side by side competing in a timed match
  • Create Together - There are two cursors in the same map and players can build together on once project
  • Art/Zen/Relaxation Mode: Focus on creative expression and relaxation.

• Undo action stack to allow players to revert changes.
• Rotate entire screen to shift tiles
• Transition from frame-based timing to potentially time-based checks to avoid slowdowns in computationally intensive scenarios.
• Add Houses/tents/castles? Not sure how to make this 'simple' for users.

• Add a view to show the current tile being placed from the cursor.
• When tile type or something switches, the cursor could change shape or style or color.
• Indicate errors through the cursor’s error state more effectively (sound/blinking?)

• Integrate sounds and music to enhance the immersive experience of the game.

• Movement Terms:

  • drow, dcol, dheight: Denote differences in row, column, and height respectively. All are ints
  • row, col, height: Denote a row, column, and height. All are ints.
  • dx, dy: Used to denote differences in x and y coordinates. All are ints.
  • MOVE: Implies relative movement.
  • SET: Indicates placing at specific coordinates, regardless of current position.
  • update(): Each class' update method will, by convention of the codebase, be executed each frame. In commits:
  • ADD: prefix for new feature added
  • REMOVE: prefix for content removed
  • REFACTOR: prefix for code refactored

Tasks are placed here after they are completed.

• Remove unecessary pyxel art
• Refactor view code to move art to 0th image
• Remove gridlines from water (increase beauty)
• Add basic waterfall visuals
• Add advanced waterfall 1/2 height animation change and alter base water texture