Ideation

I wanted to do something with falling letters, like those movie openings where they have 3D letter blocks falling from the sky but I quickly found that doing 3D stuff can get really complicated especially with letters so I decided to implement the 2D version of it.

First iteration

Initially, I wanted to mimic a pull of the letters with my mouse, so I recreated some of the code that we saw in class (seekHome) to have the letters seek the mouse pointer if it got close enough. (With some help from professor Aaron, I was able to figure out how to make the pull smoother, thanks!) This was working fine and so I decided to move on to the next part which is the falling letters.

Falling!

For this part, I had to dig up some high school physics and figure out how I would simulate gravity! I decided to give each letter a random mass (each letter is an object) and a random resistance to mimic air resistance. I also kept a time counter once gravity is turned on so that the falling speed increases with time.

I think it turned out pretty okay but I would like to figure out how to make the falling smoother as it seems quite jittery at the start.