DEV LOG 10: FINAL 05/13/25

 Sometimes the creative process morphs ideas into different ideas. and it's wonderful.

My original pitch for my final was as follows:

"My Mini Me!

I want to make a virtual pet version of myself with procedurally generated dialogue and behaviors based around real life characteristics of my personality. I’d want to include mood swings, procedural dialogue to represent how I feel, procedural changes in my tastes in food and entertainment, and other things. 


My main inspiration is the game “Tomodachi Life” and how you interact with citizens on an island to take care of their needs. I’d want to do that but with more random changes as I feel that my life changes quite frequently without really much input from me. I’d want to represent the chaos of my life within my Mini me’s life.  


Another thing that has inspired me is a Markov chain powered bot that I have in my high school friend group’s Discord server that occasionally posts messages that takes from a corpus of all of our messages. It’s kind of like our son, and I want to do something like that with the mini-me’s dialogue. I’d source things that I’ve said but also things that my friend think I would say.


I am on the fence about what platform to make this for as I greatly prefer Lua to P5 but we’ll see what happens. "

And after a week of "work" which amounted to me having to relearn a lot of p5 due to rustiness from having 3 weeks of Hydra, I ended up with this:



Wow! That's nothing! A simple penguin class, a button to spawn a carrot, generated text and barely anything else. The penguin, of course, is supposed to be me.

The feedback I got in class was that this was essentially nothing, and Professor Tusman suggested I made it a "Penguin House Party." This idea stuck with me for a while, but I didn't have any real idea of what to do, until I realized I had all the pieces right there. I could make a crowd of penguins moshing while one penguin in the middle reflects on his time there! It's a perfect representation of how I feel at concerts. I had a really rough moshpit at the last one I went to and I almost fell over so many times. It was crazy.


So I added more. I stripped out a lot of the unnecessary code now that it was no longer a virtual pet. I attempted to use a graphics buffer to display some text I was having trouble with but I realized I could just use a stroke instead. Wow. I really am terrible at P5, huh. I added 2 random oscillators under a heavy breakbeat to give an odd dance vibe to the environment. I of course added strobe lights too.


And we ended up with this:
An anxious penguin at a terrible rave.



I am so tired.

Code is Here

The song of the week is the random generated one in my final. I need to go to bed now. 

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