I’ve had the pleasure of working on games in the past, but aside from a brief foray into the drag-n-drop world of Game Maker (now Game Maker Studio), I had little experience designing and implementing my own games. But today I’m proud to announce that that has officially changed!

AVOIDANCE is a simple mouse-only game that began as an experiment in using P5.js for interactive data visualization, and quickly turned into an entertaining game of cat and mouse (pun intended) once I realized the potential of cursor position based logic. It’s an ode to procrastination by nature of avoiding that which pursues you, and an exercise in meta-procrastination by the fact that I spent a few days working on this instead of attending to my actual workload.

Having had some exposure to Processing in the past (upon which P5.js is based), I found the API to be relatively straightforward. It reminds me a bit of the CreateJS suite, which I’ve used in other games I’ve made. Ultimately I still plan to use it for visualization (my notebooks are full of half-baked interactive music visualizer ideas) and I think that making this game was a great introduction to the capabilities and quirks of the P5 library.

Without further ado: AVOIDANCE (code on github)

P.S. - it was tricky with a mouse-only mechanic, but I manage to hide some fun little easter eggs in the code. See if you can find them without reading the source code!