Flower Meadow
Link to code: https://editor.p5js.org/jiawen21/sketches/KIzy3WUZF
The Elevator Pitch: As the day changes to night and night changes to day, everything changes except for the four lonely-looking flowers. We have four flowers in a meadow, each with its own unique color, with its petals rotating while yellow-looking snow particles fall down as the day changes to night
Abstract: The concept of this project is to create a garden of flowers. Users can interact with the product by clicking the mouse to change the day into night or night into day. Users can also duplicate more colorful flowers by using a mouse press and every time when it’s refreshed, there’s a different color. As the four flowers stand there looking lonely, we also got yellow-looking snow falling down from the sky. When it’s at night, the yellow snow looks like fireflies. A garden full of flowers often reminds me of fireflies flying around and their chirping sound, which creates this peaceful feeling, thus I hope to recreate this feeling in my project.
As the environment is changing and the particles are getting less and less until there is none, the only thing that doesn’t change is the four flowers rooting in the soil. In a way, the flowers could represent almost all the students in NYUSH. Everyone in NYUSH, whether it’s the students or faculties are constantly adapting to different environments, such as a new country, culture, language, food, or a sudden covid lockdown. Everything around us is changing and happening so fast and we’re in the midst of everything, just like the flowers. As everything is happening, the flower still stays so strong, so I think we as humans should be like those flowers.
Part 2
The process started out with one flower. One flower became two and then three and it went to four. After that, I added soil to the ground because the flower garden needs soil. The reason why the soil is black and not brown is that I feel like black fits the overall color theme. I added random colors to the flowers because I didn’t want to restrict the flowers to just one color. When I think of flowers, I think of many colors so I feel like a rainbow of colors fits the concept more. The background for daytime is blue instead of white because I feel like the white background is too bland, and the half-moon is white so if I did a white background for daytime, the half-moon wouldn’t appear because it’s also white. In the beginning, there was no change between day and night. It was just two clouds where users can move the clouds. However, I feel like the interaction is kind of boring so I added the day and night so there is actually a time frame involved in the process.
Throughout the process, I definitely learn a lot about class functions and interaction that I could do with keypress and mouse press. I didn’t do key pressed because I find the key pressed kind of annoying. If there’s a key pressed, I usually have to find the key first and then pressed it, which I find the experience not convenient. With the mouse pressed, it’s much easier and I don’t need to spend time looking for a key to press. If I had the chance to redo it again, I hope to add more flowers or add some petals to the flower’s stem so the stem doesn’t look very lonely with just one stick. I also would like the flower to sway back and forth but I feel like this process would be a bit challenging for the coding knowledge that I have right now. A discovery that I encountered along the way is accumulating particles. I didn’t plan that and I discovered it by accident when I was trying my code out. I find that very interesting and I hope to do more of those functions in future projects.
What I had originally imagined in mind compared to the final product that I have is somewhat different. What I had originally imagined in my mind is a place full of sunflowers and adding time function so the sunflower could grow as time goes on. I also wanted to make the sunflower seeds and petals fly around as the wind sway the flower back and forth. However, as I started coding, I realized that coding would be a hard task for my current coding skills that I have, so I decided to just do an easy version off the idea. Originally, I didn’t plan to do the changing from day to night, but I got some suggestions during the interaction day to add some background, so I added day and night to it. I really like how it turned out. The part that I’m not satisfied with is the flower because I feel like the flower isn’t very interactive. Last but not least, the feedback that I got is very helpful. The feedback I got led me to think that not only does the project need to look good for the users but more importantly, it also needs to be user-friendly so that the user finds it comfortable, fun, and easy to interact with.
Images during the process:
