Upon approaching this assignment, I thought about generative artwork, but the truth is my brain struggles with that type of concept. I am much stronger at setting a scene or telling a story so I decided to make a cute space animation. The first order of business was creating a sky filled with twinkling stars.

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And then I thought about the night sky and how there were planets as well. These I decided to make a little larger and colorful, but I did not want them to remain solid so I added a bit of opacity.

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And finally I added the moon. At first I wanted to have the moon load at a different stages of waxing or waning each time, but I could not for the life of me figure out how to do it. I decided that on the pure black sky, a full moon would look the best and would have to do for now.

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Then the alien space ship was of course needed. At first I thought to animate the space ship. you can see the remains of the animation code below (I forgot to cut it before taking a screenshot). But then I felt it might be more fun to control the aliens with the mouse. When I set the coordinates to mouseX and mouseY as I did below, the cursor stayed directly on top of the spacecraft. This was visually irritating.

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So I decided to add pixels to each mouseX or MouseY setting.  This would allow the movement of the mouse to affect the spaceship, but would keep the cursor off of the visual.

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My final touch was a comet moving through the night’s sky. Unfortunately, I could not figure out how to make it into a sprite. I knew how to make it move using ellipses, so I decided to settle for a comet with no tail. And although the twinkling stars technically were different every time you ran the program, I felt it was not different enough to really qualify as that part of the assignment. Instead I gave the comet random starting coordinates every time the program loads.Screen Shot 2015-09-17 at 7.55.42 AM

The comet moves too fast to easily take a screen shot that includes BOTH the comet and the spaceship so to view the final animation, go to:

https://jamieruddyitp.com/projects/ICM/Spaceship%20Animation%20/