monkeysphere

{video and sketches pending}

When this assignment was first released, all I wanted to do was simulate a Monkeysphere. The program adds a “friend” every time you press any key. The most recent friend would take up the creature’s attention, thus the creature always keeps the most recent friend in its sight. Although this program was only supposed to be strictly simulation, things got a lot more personal once I started adding names since the names are of people I knew/know in real life. I started projecting, resulting in the part where you press the mouse and discover a sort of anxiety-ridden creature trying to escape the sphere but it can’t. At any rate, once you get to Dunbar’s number, the creature has hit its limit of “friends” and needs to take a break. Once you give it some time, it’ll return to befriend a new round of friends.

I think I’ll work on this a bit more to figure out smoother animations and of course, the freezing problem: the program randomly freezes during the second round of counting up to Dunbar’s number (it seems it’s 23?).