Okay, let’s talk about this little project I did, messing around with ‘firefly traces’.
Getting Started
So, the other evening, I was just thinking about those summer nights, you know? And fireflies. That soft glow, the way they leave little trails in the dark. I got this itch to try and replicate that feeling, visually. Not like, super realistic, just capture the essence of it.
I figured I’d need something simple to draw with. Didn’t want to get bogged down in complex stuff. Just needed dots, movement, and fading.
The Process – Making Dots Fly
First thing, I needed a firefly. I just made a small, bright dot. Gave it that classic yellow-greenish color. Easy enough.
Then, movement. Fireflies don’t exactly fly straight lines, do they? They kinda drift and dart around. So, I added some randomness to its direction. Made it change course slightly every so often. Kept the speed fairly slow, gentle like.
The Trace Part
This was the core idea. How to get that fading trail? My first thought was just… don’t clear the screen completely each time I draw a new frame. Instead of wiping it clean, I’d just overlay a semi-transparent black layer. This way, the old positions of the firefly would fade out gradually instead of disappearing instantly. Took a bit of fiddling to get the transparency right. Too much fade, the trail was too short. Too little, and the screen just filled up.
Adding More Bugs
One firefly is nice, but the real magic is seeing a whole bunch of them. So, I duplicated the code for one firefly. Made a bunch of them.
- Gave each one a slightly different starting position.
- Let each one move independently, following its own random path.
- Maybe varied the brightness or the exact shade of green slightly for some variety.
That started to look much better. A whole swarm of little lights blinking and drifting, leaving those faint echoes behind them.
Tweaks and Finishing Touches
I played around with it for a while. Sometimes the movement felt too robotic, so I adjusted the randomness factors. Added a tiny bit of flicker to the dots themselves, so they weren’t just constant points of light. That helped make them feel a bit more alive.
It wasn’t anything groundbreaking, really. Just a simple visual experiment. But watching those little digital fireflies create their trails was pretty calming. It captured a little bit of that quiet, magical feeling I was going for. Satisfying little practice session, all in all.
