Our final, and conference, project for Art From Code was to design an ecosystem of some sort. I thought for a while on what type I should design, and more importantly how to go about doing it. I thought about flocking simulations, or maybe rocks falling into water leading to ripples. While at large these concepts seem interesting, they seemed difficult, and more importantly uninteresting to me personally. I decided to go back to the drawing board and think about it in reverse. I knew that I wanted to use a collision system, and promptly created a simple one, balls that could bounce around the screen and each other. Then I began to think, what could these events represent? I added another variable, and had it so that when 2 balls of different colors collided with each other, they would both turn into the color of one of the colliding balls at random, almost like an infection spreading. That is where lighting struck for me, not only would there be an infection spreading, there would be an undead epidemic. To create my zombie apocalypse I initially created 2 colors of balls. Red balls representing zombies, and blue balls representing uninfected humans. If a red ball collided with a blue, the blue ball would turn red, representing them joining the hordes of undead.
However, when running the simulation, I realized it was largely uninteresting. In terms of the visuals, it was less of a zombie apocalypse, and more of a watch a bunch of balls turn red simulator, and in terms of the ecosystem, it was a world far to bleak for my tastes, with no real way to fight back against the hordes. I decided to incorporate a 3rd color of balls, green balls, or living cures. Red balls colliding with blue balls still would turn them red, but now, if a green ball were to collide with a red ball, that would turn them blue, representative of their curing from there zombie infection. With this new factor in play, each simulation would run slightly differently, sometimes the healers would slowly convert more and more zombies into humans until the zombies would all vanish. Sometimes the zombies would overrun the humans, leaving the healers to cure a couple zombies, only to have them quickly turn back after.
I enjoyed working on this project, and through working with an ecosystem I began to see some of the philosophy that comes in behind code. Small decisions like the one to include a healer can vastly change not only how a project looks visually, but can also tell a vastly different story of the world behind it. Each time I run the sim I like to watch and see all the survivors and healers do their best in the world i’ve created, and each time I hope that they win.
