Ballooons

So! I have been a little slack in posting in the last week. Since my tutorial with Steven, which really helped me get my balloons working separately, and with mouse-clicked on the actual balloons to make them grow and deflate - I managed to convince Robbie to help me out (as he was already doing in class a lot anyway) But I booked out some time today with him for a few hours, and he helped me out with my code and taught me a few things and I brought him lunch! Good trade!

So now the balloons are working in a class Array list sketch, which I had already made up, but couldn't get to work, so Robbie helped me understand why it wasnt working, and a few new shorthand things!

So now the balloons can so a lot! They can inflate, deflate, follow the mouse (as if wind how I wanted), and also you can break the straights at the base so they float up. The popping is probably the only function which I hadn't really thought about how I was going to create, and currently instead of popping they dissappear (which is what most of the examples on openprocessing do because it must be a simple way to simulate popping). So they "pop" if they get too large, and also if they hit the top of the sketch. The strings then fall which is awesome.

We also played around with bumping the balloons, so they would bump off each other if they touched, but this was a bit crap as they bumped either too little or too much, if set to small amounts, it wasn't obvious enough and was a bit jittery, and if set larger it was just jittering all over the place because of the amount of balloons they are basically just touching all the time! So it took away that kind of beautiful fluidity that I wanted with the balloons, so I haven't used it.

Finally it can add balloons. I was going to have two different add balloon functions - one where if the mouse was unmoved for 10 seconds, more balloons appear, and if you rapid click in an area a new one appears - but currently I only have the mousemoved function working.  Also I am having an issue getting the colour's to be random but a part of my scheme but that should be sorted next week.

Currently there are a few issues, I am having trouble with the cut function as the string starts disappearing left and I'm not sure why, initially it looks ok, but the more balloons you cut free, the worse the strings look. So thats an issue. And also I was thinking about adding some clouds to the background to make it a little more interesting. I don't want to detract from the balloons, but it was an idea that I thought might add to my sketch.

So a lot going on! I definitely have my pastel colour pallette sorted (I do hope I wasn't one of the people that the tutors said need to rethink the colour pallette, I was going off actual balloons pallettes I had at my neice's birthday which I think are beautiful together and bring a sense of that child innocence to my interaction.

Photos.....It's quite hard to capture some of the interactions like the mouse follow without the photos looking gross....

 You can kind of see the string falling in the above shot - its also hard to capture!

 I have stopped playing and left it at this above screen, and the below screen is what happens when you haven't interacted for 10 seconds, you can see a new balloon has been added...

Almost there!:)