CPS Week 2 - Tinkering - Particle Tinkering

By Natasha Vranic-Peters

Click >> here << to play with the particles yourself (hosted on itch.io)!

Theme:

Tinkering as method

Context:
- Particle creators in game engines (Unity, Unreal, etc) expose a lot of variables and provide ample room for tinkering and customisation, such as this one: http://particle2dx.com/ 

Method:

I will create a pseudo particle system, attempting to tinker with as many variables of the objects/particles as possible, and also expose these variables to the user so the objects/particles can be tinkered with at run-time.

Repsonse:

I began by creating a controller object which could spawn the particle objects, which were represented by coloured circles. I immediately found the result quite stagnant, so for my own enjoyment during testing, I decided to make the objects rotate around the controller. I continued to introduce more properties to my particles so that I could alter their colour and movement. Still finding the result a little "boring", I started to introduce some individual variance in the particles; they each generated a random value when they were created (between 0-255) which they would add to a lot of the effects (colour, distance, radius, movement). Then I introduced some variation in the objects’ movement using sin waves (which was also respective to the object’s random variable). The last step was creating a more user-friendly UI which exposed the variables and movement, and allowed an outside user to tweak the variables. I uploaded the result to itch.io as an HTML "game" so it could be played.