itch.io

Largely trial and error. I started with just generating a straight section of the body, and writing a colour function that would create scales. This needed a few attempts - do scales grow in width with the body or are the scales constant width (answer: constant), which curve to use? are rows of scales directly above each other or offset? (and this is why I was staring at pictures on wikimedia)

Next I neeed to make the body curve; this was based on some work I'd done before drawing strip maps (a map where a route along a road is straightened out into a column for use alongside text describing the route, usually). In that, I'd have a curved path I need to sample pixels from to draw a straight path; the reverse of what I'm doing here. When doing that I used what's known as a Dubins Path (the path a robot with a fixed turning radius would use) because it avoids overlapping samples on the inside of the curve and disconnected samples on the outside that come with making the curves too tight.

The tapering of the body was just the first thing I tried, the spikes were a hack that just worked well, and then I just had to come up with something for the head - I tried a bunch of different things like fractals before hitting on this, but there was no great theory to these bits.

I've done a bunch of "art" for the bbc microbot so this wasn't my first time tackling a problem like this, it's just a matter of breaking it down to pieces you can try independently then putting them back together. You should take a look at the bbcmicrobot gallery (link removed in case that's what's causing itch to block me commenting)- it's not just me, there's a bunch of us doing this kind of thing.