My artwork shows three race cars speeding along a simple racetrack. I love Formula 1 racing, so I wanted to recreate that feeling of speed. I was inspired by the basic car sketch example from our course website but decided to add my own twist and take it a step further by making it interactive. The cars keep looping so it looks like they are racing, and when you click a car, the FPS increases so it look like the race speeds up. Pressing R resets everything back to normal speed. I also designed a simple racetrack with grass, yellow side lines, and dashed lane markers so the cars look like they have their own lanes.
The inspiration for this piece came from our course website, which is where I found the basic car sketch as well as our substitute lesson last week with professor Riad where we explored the ball example using arrays and classes together. I used that same logic but applied it to race cars instead of balls. I also watched a few beginner p5.js tutorials on YouTube to understand how to make objects move, wrap around, and respond to mouse clicks. It took me a lot of time because I am a beginner, but I learned so much through the process.
Before starting to code, I sketched out my track layout and car design on paper. This helped me visualize the dimensions of the canvas, where the grass and track edges should be, and how many dashed lanes I needed to divide the road evenly. I also planned the car shape very simply just a rectangle with two filled circles as wheels because I wanted something that looked good but stayed beginner-friendly to code. On the side, I brainstormed interactions like clicking for color changes or speed boosts, eventually deciding on the speed change because it made the race feel more alive. This sketch was a key part of my process because it gave me a clear plan and made the coding step much easier and less confusing. It also reminded me that even with simple shapes, I could create something that feels playful and interactive.
In terms of how I organized my code, I used a setup() function to create the canvas and make three cars with different colors and speeds. These cars are stored in an array so I can easily loop through them. The draw() function runs every frame and draws the track, moves the cars, and displays them. I made a Car class with three main functions: move() to update the car’s position, show() to draw the car’s body and wheels, and clicked(Mx, My) to check if the mouse is inside the car. I also made separate functions called drawTrack() and drawDashedLine() to handle the background design so that my code stays neat and organized.
One of the parts I’m most proud of is this snippet of code:
// make cars faster when mouse is pressed (click on any car)
function mousePressed() {
for (let i = 0; i < cars.length; i++) {
if (cars[i].clicked(mouseX, mouseY)) {
fps = min(fps + 10, 120); // increase frame rate
}
}
}
// reset when R is pressed
function keyPressed() {
if (key === "r" || key === "R") {
fps = 60; // reset fps
}
This code is what makes the program interactive and fun. When the mouse is pressed, the for loop goes through every car in the array and checks if we clicked on it using the clicked() function. If we did, the frame rate (fps) goes up by 10, but never past 120 because I used the min() function to cap it. This makes the cars look like they are racing faster. The keyPressed() function resets the speed when I press R. It took me some time to this figure out how to change the FPS, but once I got it working, it felt very satisfying and made the project feel like a real race.
This was my first time using classes and arrays together in JavaScript, so it took me a long time to get it right. I had to watch many videos, look at examples, and experiment with my code to get the movement, wrapping, and interactions working correctly. The biggest challenge was figuring out how to make the cars speed up when clicked I first tried changing only one car’s speed, but it looked strange. Eventually, I made the whole race go faster when you click, which feels much more exciting and gives the sense of a real race picking up speed. Even though it was challenging, I am proud of how it turned out and I learned a lot in the process.