Picking a game making platform day 4: Scratch

Introduction: as outlined in my initial blog post, I am going to attempt to create the same basic game - that of the first few minutes of Gradius for NES - using a number of different game making platforms, one per day during my week off. I'm using GitHub to store the different projects. See my progress in the repo.

Name	Scratch v3
Web site	https://scratch.mit.edu/
Alt web site	My specific project: https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/395589141
License	Probably MIT
Git/GitHub integration	No
My github for this project	Just use the scratch site: https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/395589141
Export format(s)	no external formats, just playable via scratch

The original inspiration of this whole series of posts.

Actually, truth be told, I’m just making this post so I have two days to do the next real post (as I write this I haven’t decided yet between GameMaker and AppGameKit).

In the summer of 2020 I started doing stuff with Scratch on their web page – work was boring and Scratch isn’t hat hard – and was pleasantly surprised by how quickly I could get something up and going.

This was my initial introduction to create different sprites or characters and associating “code” with each of them.

When the green flag is clicked this kicks off the events for the different elements – for instance with different loops. Like starting a “forever” loop for some logic or sending enemies into a standard loop.

Scratch doesn’t have a typed language, it’s all jigsaw pieces snapping together. I did find a trick for a scrolling starfield background: the background is actually a “sprite” type that covers the whole screen then has its “z order” set to “negative ninety-nine”. Then this “character” can scroll right/left in an infinite loop. I found this in a YouTube video by a very bored looking man.

At the end of the day

I actually gave up on trying to use scratch to make a game when I realized I couldn’t draw a simple line. I tried every work around I could think of but never found anything. I wanted to recreate Missile Command. Turns out that game is pretty much all lines being drawn at different speeds.

And no, I wouldn’t ever bother trying to use this as a development environment. Although there are some really impressive creations like 3D Platformer and an especially polished 2D platformer.