Project 1: Natural Systems

The assignment: ideate a natural system and design it in Processing. I chose to prototype a pond in which a frog grows up. It starts life as a tadpole eating lettuce and grows to a frog that eats flies. I've always been fascinated by amphibians, frogs in particular. They have an interesting life cycle and evolutionary history. My favorites are the poison dart frogs of Central and South America with their bright colors, small stature, and toxic protective system.

This is my initial diagram:

After feedback and consideration, it served best to work without the constraint of the lily pad and to consider the tadpole and the frog as two versions of the same object. This is the resulting diagram:

With this planned out, I went through several iterations of coding, figuring things out one bit at a time. By version 6 I had a pretty good working prototype:

I tried to keep the translation of the system to code as literal as possible. Tadpoles eat lettuce that users can click onto the screen, and at a certain point, grow up to become frogs that eat the flies that randomly appear. I initially had two user interactions planned out, but accomplishing the first was as much as I could accomplish within the deadline.

For future iteration, I plan on figuring out how to rotate the images relative to their direction of movement. I'd like to reintroduce the idea of the lily pads as constraints for the adult frog's movement, and I also considered having the flies compete with the tadpoles for the lettuce.