Week Two!
What can I say? This past week has been a doozy, and my inability to express myself on P5 is not making life any easier! While fighting a cold, I’ve spent at least two dozen hours fighting with code to achieve what would seem the most basic tasks in the p5 web editor, and I think I have single-handedly raised the play count for Coding Train episodes 2.1-2.4 by at least 1k. You’re welcome, Dan Schiffman.
Our assignment this week was to apply some of our newly acquired concepts for simple interactions and animations to either a new sketch or toward integrating these techniques into our existing sketches from last week’s homework. My masterpiece for last week was titled “Sponge Robert”, a poor and unfortunate approximation of the ubiquitous lovable sponge. I felt I had a strong enough grip on the material to continue that project, with one very simple objective: how can I make its eyes move? “No problem” I thought to myself, figuring this would be an easy enough task,: a little “mouseX” here, a dash of “map()” there, and voila.
No. Not a chance. Not so simple, and it got the better of me. I pored over the code of as many as twenty sketches of eye interactions, from blinking with a click, to tracking with a hover. Yet when I attempted some of these snippets of code (which I will respectfully attribute, worry not), I’d find myself tangled up and dizzy and sometimes really out of my depth. How can something that seemed such an accessible project elude me so? And with each error, that pair of infernal green eyes laughing at me, piercing into my soul and taunting me into an oblivion of self-doubt and misery. The machine has won this round, but I don’t go down without a fight.
But maybe you can help!