DSDN 142

Project 3

Mouse Toy
Development

After a long period of experiments and hair pulling stress of countless and countless code that just wouldn't work, I managed to successfully develop this idea into what almost looks like a final. Originally I was thinking of having a reset button, but I thought what would be the fun in that? Just press a button and boom, starts all over again back to square one. Instead of that however, I set up the squares so that after a certain amount of bounces they would just fall from the bottom of the screen and disappear forever, with the exception of the very first square to stay of course. My friend who does coding up at Kelburn campus talked me through it and taught me how to add counts within my code so that the random generated squares would disappear after their time is up. I have uploaded a video below which showcases the process and interaction so far, I have also added music to it just as background noise since it was recorded straight from my laptop.

Song used - "Sierra Leone" by Mt Eden Dubstep

DSDN 142

Project 3

Mouse Toy

Development

My idea is to develop my recent sketch so that it starts off with a black box with a singular square bouncing up and down. This square will be flashing with rainbow colours which look great and contrasted with the black background. Taking the idea from tetris and the original code from the tutorial, I want to spawn more squares randomly with an interaction. I started off by using the mousePressed function to click on the bouncing square so it can generate more squares, but that was far to hard as the object was too quick to be clicked on and processed. So I changed this to mouseMoved which simply means I just have to move the mouse cursor through the shape to create more shapes inside the box. 

The images below were my earlier experiments using just plain black and white colours to show how this exactly works. As you can see it starts off with only one, then as the cursor moves through it the more squares spawn and so on. In the end you're left with a very noisy box filled with white squares with no where to go. It didn't get laggy for a while however, but after a few seconds it started to slow itself down. I figured a way to fix this would be to either add a reset button, or find another solution.

DSDN 142

Project 3

Mouse Toy
Development/Research

I researched around to what looks similar to my idea to gain inspiration from, and found that the game tetris could be a good influence within my interaction. I thought this because of the wide range of randomized colours and the fact that is uses squares/rectangles as the shapes within it. Of course mine isn't going to be a game nor will it move like the way tetris moves, but it'll have some of it's qualities expressed from it.

Image retrieved from: https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiRKMAKdjR8kNOfa4sgFihEKmgtfGyKUmo4CPNLfKvs6hoL6kkwLAHOuT7PtgoxlsGCpt39Tr6VygfYkRDrJKKNINNepHTgUiNxEnzxAdiTyWbtlRWXqXBh5N6jZy5Tw3vwyxfXVBvWNH8/s1600/fullscreen_tetris.png

Image retrieved from: http://i1003.photobucket.com/albums/af157/hostic/tetris.jpg

DSDN 142

Project 3

Mouse Toy
Development

Leading on from the last post, I decided that the plain grayscale colours weren't going to work, since they didn't stand out that well at all. With this one, I added R, G, B to it and randomised the colours so that the square would flicker through every colour as it moves. This is what it looks like and I quite like the look of it - 

DSDN 142

Project 3

Mouse Toy
Development

This is my idea, well the start of my final idea. I experimented with different colours and once again couldn't decide what to stick to, so I just chose white, grey and black for a start to see what it would look like if it were to change and flicker through all of them. This is what happened -

DSDN 142

Project 3

Mouse Toy
Development

Continuing from last post, I have experimented with the number of objects/shapes that are inside the box. I tried it out with just the normal 20, then 40, then 100 shapes bouncing up and down. I also chose to change it to a rectangle because the animation is much more clearer compared to an ellipse when it bounces, plus it looks a whole lot better. In the end, I found that i liked and enjoyed the look of all 3 sketches.

DSDN 142

Project 3

Mouse Toy
Development

I've been experimenting a lot with my code and what it does, and have decided to tweak it a little and develop it to something that would be more interactive and cool to look at. Instead of having floating bubbles, I had a look around and found that the tutorial -

"particleengine with sound"

on the

http://schoolofdesign.ac.nz/course/view.php?id=128 website

was something I found I could look at. I didn't focus on the adding sound part but I liked the way that the objects bounced up and down. I've taken a screenshot of what the code they have provided looks like, with a couple of experiments of my own below. The normal code consist of just 20 ellipse's bouncing up and down. I changed up the shape to rectangles and also inverted the colour to see which one suited more.