Spaghett.io - A shared drawing space for noodley lines (among other things)
Using the template from the cmuems-drawing-game, I created a shared drawing space where lines have a maximum length and can "weave" through existing lines. I was interested in playing with the idea of the "shared" space by creating constraints that prevent canvas hogging. Since intersecting lines will weave under existing ones, new drawings integrate into old ones rather than covering them up. Each line cannot exceed 1000 pixels, discouraging canvas-sized scribbles and unthoughtful space consumption.
I had an alternate concept for this app where touching lines would be deleted, encouraging people to add lines without intersecting the other clients' in a Blokus-like fill-up-the-space game. In the code you can see an area where I made an attempt (I plan on returning to it), but deleting the right lines proved to be more complex than I anticipated.
Process:
I think one of my problems for this assignment was that I could come up with ideas faster than I could figure out how to make them. For this project, I originally had planned on making a "radio chat" where you could use a slider or dial to speak to people on the same "channel" as you. Landing on an unstable channel would produce a certain level of "static" from the other chats. I spent the first week of this assignment dissecting the chat template and trying to teach myself how to use html with p5. After a lot of frustration and confusion with the template, I switched over to the drawing app to see if I would have better luck. I had gotten about a third of the way through with this project when I had the idea of a drawing game that responded to intersections. Hesitant to abandon my first week of progress, I experimented with adding the intersection assignment's code to the drawing app and found myself much more interested in the new concept. Though I feel like I ended this project with a handful of semi-finished apps rather than a more robust deliverable, I really enjoyed working through these problems and would like to revisit some of them in the future.
