John August

Geek Alert

How and why we made the One Hit Kill app

Geek Alert, One Hit Kill

ohk-app-iconWhen One Hit Kill ships in September, it will have printed rules in the box like every other game.

But because OHK is designed to grow and change — both with our own expansion packs and user-created variants — we wanted to be able to quickly update and “officialize” rules to reflect the state of the game.

So we did what we do. We made an app.

The One Hit Kill app is free in the App Store. There’s also a web app that works on Android and other devices.

Under the hood

This is our first iOS app written in Swift, Apple’s next-generation coding language. Nima Yousefi originally prototyped it in Objective-C, but when it became clear we would be using primarily stock elements and libraries, he rewrote it in Swift.

Nima reported very few issues making the change. Swift is certainly readable. It’s the first app we’ve made where I can look at the code and basically understand what’s happening, so that’s remarkable.

Within the app, the pages themselves — from rules to the FAQ — are written in Markdown, and rendered as text rather than web views. (We do the same thing in Weekend Read.)

The app pulls its data from the cloud: Rails running on Heroku. From a web interface, we can update the text and images for any piece of content, then push it out live. It’s not Facebook or Twitter levels of performance, but it meets our lightweight needs.

We are on the verge of submitting version 1.1 of the OHK app, which trades out some of the table views for collections. That allows us to flatten some of the hierarchy and show more cards at once, particularly on the iPad.

Making it work on Android

Because a lot of our backers will be on Android or other devices, we wanted to provide a version of the app for them as well.

After considering several alternatives, we chose Framework7 to build a web app that would work regardless of the platform. Framework7 unapologetically tries to fake an iOS look, but our Android users haven’t objected. For iOS developers in similar situations with fairly simple, text-based apps, we’d recommend giving Framework7 a look.

There can only be One

Our primary reason for building the One Hit Kill app was to make it easy to update the rules and artwork.

Another goal was to protect the name One Hit Kill.

It’s not an idle worry. The Exploding Kittens game in the App Store is terrible: a generic whack-a-mole with no relation at all to the wildly popular Kickstarter. No doubt thrown together in an afternoon, it’s attempting to draft off the Kittens brand name. (The developer’s other games include “the 2048 game” and Flappy Chappy, neither of which have any reviews.)

The One Hit Kill app should at least stave off the most obnoxious clones, and keep the name available to us down the road.

So take a look at the app, and check out the web app if you’re curious.

One Hit Kill itself is available exclusively through Kickstarter, and only until June 5th.

How color timing works

Directors, Film Industry, Geek Alert

Daryn Okada offers a great look at how a cinematographer approaches color-timing a feature in this latest video from The Academy:


It’s important to remember that when you see the dull, flat “before” footage, it’s not a mistake. These films aren’t saved in color timing, the way fashion models are transformed by Photoshop. Rather, modern DPs plan for color timing from the start, making choices both in prep and shot-by-shot to get the best possible image.

Screenplays on the Kindle, 2015 edition

Follow Up, Formatting, Fountain, Geek Alert, Highland, How-To, Weekend Read

A screenwriter friend just emailed me to ask how she could get one of her scripts to look good on the Kindle. She had Googled and discovered I’d written about reading screenplays on the Kindle twice back in 2009. (I was an early Kindle adopter.)

Back in 2009, I found there to be a lot of potential for reading screenplays on the Kindle, but a lot of frustration.

Six years later, what’s changed?

Nothing. Kindles and screenplays are still a bad fit.

Attempting to get screenplays to look screenplay-like on Kindle is a fool’s errand, so let me actively dissuade you from trying. Down this path lies futility and despair.

It’s not the Kindle’s fault.

Kindles are designed for free-flowing text like books. They don’t know anything about how screenplays work, and they will fight you at every step. We know. We tried. That’s a large part of why we made Weekend Read.

If you’re starting with a PDF, the closest you can probably come on the Kindle is to run the script through Highland and save it as a Fountain file. That’s just plain text, so if you then import it into Kindle’s parser, you’ll get a rough approximation, with everything set on the left margin:

INT. HOUSE – DAY
Mary and Tom carry in groceries.
TOM
They oughta call it, “Whole Paychec—
— THWACK! Tom is impaled by a spear.
CUT TO:

I write in Fountain, so this looks fine to me. But that’s not what my friend was looking for. She wanted something like a printed screenplay, and you’re just not going to get that on the Kindle.

But you can get closer. If you dig into the text file and carefully set tags for character names and transitions, you can have them centered or moved to the right margin. Or you can bail on the screenplay formatting. Dave Trottier has instructions you can follow to make something that looks more like a published stage play. It’s incredibly tedious, but it’s possible.

With a lot of work, you can make something that looks okay — but only okay. That’s the best you’re going to get, and it’s not worth the effort. So in 2015, I use my Kindle for books and my iOS devices for screenplays. Each is the right tool for the job.

In praise of flat adverbs

Geek Alert, Words on the page

Emily Brewster of Merriam-Webster offers a cogent defense of “drive safe,” “take it easy” and other cases in which adverbs seem to be missing their -ly ending:


It’s not simply a matter of do-what-you-want. These words really are adverbs, they just look like their related adjective forms. A good example is “near.” It’s an adjective, a preposition and adverb — even though there is also an -ly form.

It was a near miss. [adjective]

I work near the train station. [preposition]

The deadline draws near. [adverb]

Christmas is nearly here. [adverb]

They’re all related, but you can’t use them interchangeably.

Last night, Stuart corrected something I wrote in a Kickstarter update. Instead of “look close,” he suggested “look closely.” Both work, but there’s something I really love about the flat form.

Thanks to Bryce Edmonds for the link.