Move the mouse around and help our friend ghost practicing its chameleon superpowers!
Before coming up with this idea I tried everything! This morning I participated to another online getting unstuck video gathering, this time with my educator friends in Italy. I didn't have much time and I wanted to help others, so I ended up with a super simple project of a ghost eating a banana (when touching yellow). After the video call I tried to iterate on that, but I wasn't satisfied with the idea and I didn't know what to do next. I thought of starting a different project adding color sensing "antennas" to a sprite so it can follow a line, like my friend @augusto did for his beetle race (we were in the call together), but again I didn't know how to push the idea further in a meaningful way. At some point I went to the getting unstuck website to check out some strategies. One of them was: "Try something new". So I started something completely new: painting colorful blobs, waiting for the inspiration. At some point, I wondered if I could make a sprite walk in my painting (like @giuliooo did in his project) and changing color like a chameleon, based on where it is. So I picked the ghost (just because @frjurado suggested me to continue the saga) and started experimenting. I noticed that changing the color effect on the ghost made it cycle only between certain colors and I wondered what those colors had in common. After a lot of trials and errors I realized that changing the color effect by 20 on the sprite makes the color value (the first bar in the color chooser) shift by 10, keeping saturation and brightness the same. So I discovered which are the colors that the ghost could turn into, and I painted the background accordingly, tinkering with the size and spacing of the dots. First I had the ghost move randomly but then I figured it was more fun to control it with the mouse and make it pass through the colors you want. I was surprised to realize that, even when I had no idea of what to do, I never panicked: I knew that I would end up with something satisfying at the end. Part of the reason is that I didn't feel time pressure, also because I could keep working in it during the weekend. But more importantly, I think that creating and reflecting every day is making me more comfortable with the creative process. Even when I'm not making progress I know it's not wasted time. In the long run, I know that the more time I stay in the process the better the outcome will be. And that is not intuitive because the quality of the outcome doesn't increase proportionally with the time, but it is non-linear: it progresses with jumps and it often goes backwards. If I had more time I would experiment more with color transitions, for example having the ghost fade from one color to another instead of changing suddenly. Maybe I'll do it if I find some time during the weekend! Or maybe I should take a break!! :)) Have a great weekend everyone!
