Introducing: Digital Doodles

Bitesize fun for net-based people

In this post, I’d like to introduce a recurring feature: Digital Doodles. Every so often, I’ll be posting a tiny code project aimed at bringing a little light to your day and, hopefully, inspiring you to try something new! Wherever possible, I’ll be sharing what went into it, and encouraging you to share your own; or even to amend and improve on what I’ve shared.

The brief for a Digital Doodle is (loosely) as follows:

1. Easily shareable: if you can produce GIF, video, or audio output from whatever it is you’ve made, then that’s great for sharing!

2. Quick to produce: you should only spend as much time on a Digital Doodle as you’re willing to. In my case, it’ll probably be no more than an hour or two for each.

3. Fun for you: the goal is not to impress others, or produce something amazing. It’s to play around, flex your brain a little, and enjoy yourself.

These are not ‘rules' I’m going to hold myself (or anybody else) to particularly strictly: but ‘Shareable, quick, fun’ seems to me like a good set of constraints to at least try to abide by!

If you’ve never coded before, or are just starting out, then I’m hoping this feature will be a good place for you to practice, feel inspired, or just have some fun!

So, without further ado(odle)…

Welcome to BoopLand

A world populated entirely by colourful circles, wandering until they hit walls. Why would you create such a thing, I hear you ask? Because I can, my friends. Because I can.

Inspired by

Dom Aversano

to give P5.js a whirl - I decided to brush up on some of my incredibly rusty JavaScript skills and implement the most pointless thing I could think of. This will win no prizes for imagination or technical skills, but it was fun to try something new. Audio is implemented via the excellent ZzFX synth library - which is well worth trying out for all of your web-based zip-zap needs.

You can try out BoopLand for yourself over at CodePen. It will start automatically - and you can stop or restart it by clicking anywhere in the bottom window. You may need to click in the canvas area to hear the audio.

I’ll probably play around with P5.js some more - there are some very cool and fun examples in their 2022 showcase, so if this kind of mucking about is your cup of tea on a rainy Sunday afternoon, then I can think of worse things to spend your time doing!

I think it’s probably been around a decade since I last used JavaScript in any meaningful sense, so this was a nice way to revive some deeply buried knowledge and get back in the swing of things.

If you’d like to fiddle with BoopLand, just visit the CodePen - I’ve left some variables near the top of the JavaScript file which will let you tweak some basic things, and then you can dive further into things if you’d like to make some more serious changes.

Show Me What You Got

If, like me, you like to try things out just for the fun of it, then please do get in touch in the comments and share whatever random, utterly pointless gems you’ve been working on. I’d like to make this a recurring feature with contributions from subscribers, so if you’d like to modify BoopLand, or share your work, feel free!