Newsletter • Issue 65
Feathery 404, Digital Card Game, and Flippy Chess!
Last Week’s Live Show
Behind the Scenes: Elegant Seagulls — www.youtube.com
Ryan LaBar joined us on the stream to walk through the new Elegant Seagulls site and break down some of the coolest effects.
We recreated the 404 page and Rolodex (check the CodePens below) and learned some cool
CodePens
Hack. A digital card game — codepen.io
Another wonderful game from our friend Jamie Coulter. In Hack your goal is to protect your mainframe while gaining access to rival data.
It’s a fun game with beautiful UI and brilliant sound design, just like the rest of Jamie’s CodePen games.
The game’s randomness is seeded so you can challenge your friend to beat the exact deck you faced by sending them the code.
We learned how to make this demo the other day on the stream with Ryan. Move your mouse over the screen and feathers will get painted behind the hidden “404” message.
Check out the horse version we created, and watch the video above for the tutorial!
GSAP Rolodex Menu — codepen.io
This was the other CodePen we made, leveraging GSAP Draggable to make a spinny wheel to match the one on Elegant Seagulls’s site.
Chess movement (GSAP Flip) — codepen.io
When I think of Chess and FLIP, it’s usually because I’ve just lost and turned the board over.
Peter Norton uses the GSAP Flip plugin to demonstrate how each piece moves around the board. I love the way the boards rotate when you choose a different piece.
Paper craft animation — codepen.io
Not only is this a super cute SVG illustration and animation, but the mouse-based parallax is the icing on the cake.
Inspiration
Choo-Choo World - A Web Based Wooden Train Track Builder — choochooworld.com
If you’ve ever played Roller Coaster Tycoon, you’ll love this site.
You build your track with tunnels, loops, ramps, curves, and more. There’s even a first-person camera option and a night mode. Spend a few minutes revisiting your childhood.
So long, partner
Thanks for riding along!
I’m currently moving the newsletter from Revue to honestly anything but Revue. I do not recommend Revue.
So I spent the last week making a Prismic ➡️ MJML pipeline that automates a bunch of stuff and gives me full control over the style of the newsletter.
Unfortunately, when it came to sending the email, I couldn’t get it working in ButtonDown, ConvertKit, or anywhere else yet.
I’m also working on moving the website from Gatsby to Astro, which has been its own process.
With all of that, I didn’t have too much time to put into this specific issue.
So hopefully the next issue will be snazzier and work perfectly. Or you’ll get a story about a whole new set of bugs! Either way, we’ll have fun with it.
Your neigh-bor,
Alex