Concept
I wanted to make a generative text output inspired by one of my favorite childhood comfort food: alphabet soup. It’s a tomato soup where the pasta is made out of the letters (a-z). I wanted to recreate a soup bowl that would have letters floating around. In the sketch, it shows a white dinner plate with a reddish tomato soup filling, with 80 randomly generated lowercase letters slowly bouncing around inside the soup. The letters stay contained within the circular bowl, and when they hit the edge, it reverses direction just like real pasta letters drift and bump in a bowl of soup.
My Final Sketch!
Code I’m Proud Of
// keep inside soup
if (dist(l.x, l.y, cx, cy) > radius) {
l.speedX *= -1;
l.speedY *= -1;
}
Before I had these lines, my letters were all just floating around the whole sketch and I needed a way to keep the letters within the soup circle. Instead of checking rectangular walls, I used the dist() function to measure how far each letter has drifted from the center of the soup. When that distance exceeds the soup’s radius, both speed values get flipped by multiplying by -1, sending the letter bouncing back inward. This keeps all 80 letters perfectly contained within the circular soup area at all times.
How This Was Made
I used a loop that runs 80 times to create 80 letter objects, each placed at a random position inside the soup circle using polar coordinates and it picks a random angle and distance from the center, then converts them into x and y coordinates with cos() and sin(). Each letter gets a random character using String.fromCharCode(), which converts numbers 97–122 into a through z (I learned this from w3schools), along with random speed values for both directions. All of this gets stored as objects in an array called letters[]. Every frame, each letter’s position is nudged by its speed values to create the floating movement, and dist() checks whether it has drifted too far from the center and if it has, both speeds are flipped by multiplying by -1, then it shows a bouncing movement of the letter back inward and contained within the soup circle. For the font, I played around with different fonts and I landed on Courier which was the closest I could find to the chunky, typewriter-style lettering you actually see on real alphabet pasta.
Reflection and Future Improvements
This project taught me how useful polar coordinates are for placing things inside a circle instead of just rectangular, and I got a lot more comfortable using object literals inside arrays as a lightweight way to store and manage multiple moving things at once. Next time, I’d love to add mouse interaction so clicking near a letter makes it spin or dissolve, add a spoon that follows the cursor and stirs letters out of the way, or occasionally have the letters briefly cluster into short words before drifting apart again, something like the artwork “Text Rain” that we looked at in class.