I felt very engaged in Homework 1, and stuck on Homework 2. They were very similar in structure, and I chose to do very similar types of projects for both of them. However:
Homework 1:
My project felt more artistic to me for some reason, even though both projects involved colorful visuals.
I was very excited about this project and started it very early on. It actually took much longer than Homework 2, but I was inspired and motivated the whole time.
I had background knowledge of Voronoi diagrams and knew how they worked.
The project felt more open, perhaps because it was the first one and there were a lot of possibilities. I also started more from scratch here.
Homework 2:
I followed a process very similar to what I did for the first project. However, I started it later and had less time to complete it.
Felt slightly more restrictive. I know I could have gone a different direction for this than the first project, but I decided to stick with what I know.
There was more starter code to use for this project, but therefore also more black box processes.
I did not have any background on genetic algorithms. I would have liked to do more research to see more examples of them and what they can do, so maybe I would have had more inspiration.
Personally I always have a terrible time trying to understand and use/alter someone else's code. I'd much rather take the time to write code myself than use an existing library or project and try to read through and understand exactly what each line does, and which ones I can edit without causing problems.