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Square Zero: hide silly messages in decorative borders


2024-12-04 I decided to include an Easter Egg in our New Years greeting this year1. If you managed to decipher it, you'd be treated to a retro mini-game based on the card.

Fast-forward a few daysweeks months and I've rewritten the border generator from scratch in vanilla JavaScript using<canvas> to do the rendering. This helps, but the results are inconsistent depending on the ratio of the width and height - sometimes the error would cause the border to underflow (or overflow) the expected number of bits per side. The underlying code is surprisingly simple - The background is animated via CSS, there's a very straight-forward collision detection system, and the music and sound effects I made in BeepBox.

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Photo of decorative borders

decorative borders

Photo of silly messages

silly messages

Photo of Square Zero

Square Zero