The Concept

I chose this concept because I wanted to to something light-heart and silly while I was learning to code. Florum is a kind of a digital "bug." She's a little disco diva princess. The dance "music" is an electronic pulsating drone sound that is on a loop. Left mouse clicks will make her emit strange digital noises. Right mouse clicks with make images appear. I used key presses to change her poses. I think my goals were beyond my current abilities when I first planned how I would create the program. I spent over 20 hours playing around with different approaches. I tried to get the arms to animate on their own, but I was not happy with any of the results I had. I'm sure with time and more advanced practice I would be able to achieve my original goals. Still, I'm happy with my adaptations. It may not be as elaborate as I hoped, but there is still some cool stuff.

What I Learned & How I Applied It

I finally cracked my background rectangles issues and got them to behave like I wanted. I used arrays to create the background blocks and the bubbles. The bubbles I had previously applied here using an array. It was learning where to put the timer to get the blocks to change every second that took some work. 

I was able to utilize functions that were called by conditionals and that also had conditionals within them. The different poses of Florum are all functions. Florum's soft appearance has evolved over the semester, but I continued to use loops to construct her look. I figured out how to embed conditionals in those functions to make her perform different actions and make sounds. The sound stuff was all new to me. I'm glad I learned it. I did use two images, like I learned to do for the game project.

The sound part took some effort. I tried to do it without the Minim library at first, but ended up downloading the library because it had useful functions that helped me control the sound. At first, the embedded sound files were playing at 100% and sounded very distorted. I learned how to turn down the gain to make them play at an acceptable volume. I also had to convert a wav file to mp3 because Processing kept giving me an error message, even though the code was correct. I guess Processing doesn't work well with wavs.

Overall, despite some frustrating moments, I definitely feel my confidence has increased with creating code and being able to read it. I still have a ton of stuff to learn, but I definitely want to continue. I would like to advance to Python at some point and create my own MIDI device.