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How Poly Bridge's GIF Generator Turned an Indie Game Into a Reddit Sensation
An anonymous reader writes: The creator of bridge physics phenomenon Poly Bridge discusses the rise of the bridge physics phenomenon in a new interview this week. Patrick Corrieri of New Zealand's Dry Cactus studio reveals the Reddit hit has sold at least 48,000 copies so far, but that its smartest feature, a GIF generator to capture all your successful crosses and crashes, only came about by accident: "Ultimately it was another independent developer, Zach Barth from Zachotronics, who pushed me to integrate the feature. Not only that, but he also gave me the source code to his GIF encoding routine so I could hit the ground running. That's what is so awesome about the indie dev community: a willingness to share and learn from each other, as growing together is much better than competing with one another."
This developer doesn't get enough recognition. His games are always fun and good.
It's the place where people with psychiatric problems, who are in perpetual debt, can't get medical insurance and whose evil boss won't give them paid time off for an abortion - go to hang out.
The success of animated gifs, despite their horrible inefficiency as a video format, reflects the utter failure of websites, standards bodies, etc., to provide a simple, reliable way to deliver video to a browser. When I visit a website with a video, there's a substantial chance that it won't work - and it's almost certain not to work unless I enable Javascript and run whatever possibly-malicious code the website serves up.
Animated gifs are simple, reliable, and - as far as I know - completely secure. I'm perfectly happy to lose a factor of two (or ten) in bandwidth in return for that peace of mind.