I first spent a long time making this the wrong way, with a dx and dy for each object that incremented cx and cy with each call of the draw function. Mistake! That was not the purpose of the assignment, but it gave me good practice.
I also got a decent amount of trig and geometry practice by borrowing Golan's triangle-circle arc transformation code, to implement the bouncing guys as circles who would transform into triangles and back as they bounced (see sketches.) However, this didn't provide the naturalistic bouncing I wanted so I deviated from my original plan. Ultimately, I never got the squishy effect I wanted, this probably required a more complex simulation of the bouncing entity that took 3D volume, gravity, and density into account.
The easing algorithms I chose were quadratic for squishing width / height(the simplest option that was more interesting than linear,) and smoothStep for bouncing / movement. In real life, the effect of gravity is closer to a parabola, but I liked how smoothStep looked.
I don't think this piece is conceptually strong or memorable, but I did learn a lot. Now that I have a better handle on p5 and animation, I can hopefully start making more interesting work.
Paper sketches:
