Callie’s Page


This is my blog from my first semester at ITP. I have since switched to a Notion blog which you can view here.


Fall 2024


Intro to Physical Comp:



Intro to Comp Media:



Hypercinema:






P002 → Week 3 - Choices



I chose to make a recreation of one of the more famous choices, the ‘trolley problem.’ Will the user choose to intervene? 

The logic for this idea ended up being pretty simple relative to other sketches. Most of the time came from getting the shapes and positioning I needed from p5. 



This is certainly not a coding best practice, but a lot of the numbers are hard-coded in or moved around using translate() 

For example, to get the numbers for the lever handle position I printed mouseX and mouseY and entered them into the leverPosition variables (picture). 

I was finding it cumbersome and time consuming to readjust numbers without translate(). Is there a better way to do this without relying on the canvas size staying the same? Perhaps just better planning on my part in deciding where each element should be placed? 


Here’s the main logic for the “choice” 

(sidenote but I would love to be able to paste code blocks into Cargo with the styling/markup from P5... has anyone managed to do this? Internet was not very helpful) 

I had to mess around with the conditions, especially for the second ‘if’ statement. To make sure the trolley looked like was travelling down the second track, I needed the x>60 condition so that it wouldn’t immediately begin drifting downwards before reaching the intersection. 
  if (
    mouseIsPressed &&
    leverFlipped == false &&
    dist(mouseX, mouseY, leverPositionX, leverPositionY) < 50
  ) {

    leverPositionX -= 100;
    leverFlipped = true;
  }


  if (leverFlipped == true && x > 60) {
    y = y + 0.5;
  }


And here’s the final result: