Jellyfish

Tools

Used

• Pico-8
• Visual Studio Code

Focus

Systems

• Procedural animation
• Ambient simulation
• Ripple interactions

What:

Jellyfish Tank is an ambient Pico-8 simulation focused on fluid motion, procedural animation, and interactive environmental effects. It began as a simple jellyfish study and expanded into a small ecosystem of light, sound, currents, and reactive creatures.

Why:

The goal was to see how far calm, life-like movement and subtle interactions could be pushed inside Pico-8’s constraints. It was both a creative white-noise toy and a technical study in animation, architecture, and performance.

How:

• Jellyfish tentacles use joint-based motion with sine and cosine oscillation for soft trailing movement.
• Momentum, damping, and ripple forces help movement feel buoyant instead of mechanical.
• Ripples affect nearby creatures, bubbles, algae, and other environmental systems.
• Light, food, waste, and drifting currents all feed back into the overall tank behavior.
• Systems were split into modular helpers so creature logic, ripple logic, and effects could evolve separately.
• Performance was kept manageable through lightweight data structures and cleanup outside tank bounds.