Habit Tracker

I had started to learn about cellular automata and especially the Game of Life. This is a simulation of a developing population of – whatever. You have living and dead cells. A set of rules determines whichs cells stay alive, die or become alive again. Developing my own rules for this is still kind of beyond me. So I worked my way through Dan Shiffman’s tutorial on Youtube (The Coding Train, Coding Challenge #85) and thought about doing some art with it.

I needed something that can be visualized with squares – so what would be better than my habit tracker for the Season of Habit in Get Messy. That’s where this whole project started. I made two versions. If it stops moving, just refresh the screen.

Version 1

Version 2

How to prepare for Halloween?

Lately I was getting kind of frustrated with all the coding concepts I still don’t quite get, although I use them. Paint on paper is just so much easier. You can fool around with your materials and see where it takes you. For coding I need a plan. And that got frustrating.

So I just wanted to play around with a few elements of sketches I had done on this challenge so far. No thinking, only changing numbers and colors or commenting out lines to see how it reacts. I guess the result gives an impression on my feelings toward Brexit.

Watch it in action. You can move the mouse 😉

Discover my journals

The last few days I didn’t manage to code new things. I was working on the last sketch for longer than I had expected and that threw me off my rhythm.

Plus, I realized the functionality is crippled on a mobile phone. For example, you can’t click the brush from the last one if you watch it on a phone. I didn’t know you had to handle a click on a touchpad differently than with a mouse. So I fixed that now. I still have to check my older P5 sketches. And the images don’t scale to the mobile screen. Now I have to find a fix for that as well. The documentation on these problems is not very detailed though.

So I felt the need to just make something small and fun. I found one of my oldest sketches, done in the original Java-based Processing. I transferred it to P5.js and combined it with the torch-light from Mondrian.

Here are all my journals – looking just like the real ones.

Paint your own canvas

This one was driving me nuts! It was nearly as complex as the bat chasing the flies over the moon light castle, but I programmed it in four days rather than three month. I hope I learned something…

I still have a few ideas for this sketch – letting the color dots swirl around so that the painter has to catch them with the brush or being able to choose own colors for the palette. Let’s see when this will happen.

Click the brush to hit the color points.

Blowing Winds

It’s Inktober and you find inspiration everywhere!

A friend made drawing of a playing wind creature which started a conversation between us. Something she said gave me the idea of a wind blowing a cloud around the screen – and of course it had to be two winds in a sporty “cloud fight”.

Only this morning I realized I had started a version of the classical Pong game made by Atari back in the early days of Arcade Games. I plan to do some more modifications: I have ideas for the design of the two winds and how to make the “game” more difficult and fun to play. If you have any ideas or wishes, please tell me in the comments.

Go play it here. Just click on the side of the wind you want to be blowing.

Habit Half Way

Today is the day right in the middle of my seven weeks coding project for the Get Messy Season of Habit. So I thought I make something that looks back and forth. First I wanted to create a slider to run over the picture and change its color. But I couldn’t find a way how to implement that. Then I came up with the idea of the arrow pointing back and forth.

For the handwriting I searched for open and creative common fonts and found one called Firlefanz. This is my Instagram name – of course I had to have it! But it said “personal use only”. When I tried it in my code it wrote “demo” and a name or copyright in very small letters unter my coded writing. First I was annoyed and wanted to change the font.

Then I looked close and – it said the name of a friend from Get Messy, www.anke-art.de. Such a coincidence! I learned she had made 62 fonts so far, most of them “for personal use” if you don’t buy it. But I have a slight idea how much work goes into creating a font. At the moment I am not earning any money with this project, so I guess it counts as private use, but I will ask her.

Here is my “page”. Flip the arrow!