Froggies!

For my ecosystem, I started out with a fish pond because I remember a while back google had a random koi fish app somewhere on the internet. I tried searching it up again but I only see different android apps. I tried modelling the tail movements of the fish, but those ended up looking like tapeworms… So, I reused the curveVertex design that I featured in my first lasercut and added eyeballs. The lillypads have a gravitational force, so it looks like they try to hide from you. I applied Daniel Schiffman’s flocking examples to separate the fishes so they all wouldn’t go into the same spot due to the averaging of gravitational pulls. When you click the lillypads to make them disappear, the gravitational force gets added to the other lillypads so the fish don’t slow down. Pressing the space bar adds more lillypads. The lillypads, by the way, are cardioids, and they oscillate up and down and cause ripples. That was the funnest part of this project.

Then I decided to add frogs. I wanted them to leap onto a different lillypad when you clicked on one so that you would be “scaring them away”, but I had enough problems just getting them to jump on different lillypads. Giving them velocities ended up in hours of project failures, so this became my end product. Anywho, the best part about them is that they blink.

Here is my openprocessing upload, but the Javascript version of the code is far glitchier than the regular version run on processing:

Here are my sketches (notice I started out with the idea of Puffles hiding under rocks instead of a fish pond):