I Made Four Weird Scratch Games in a Week

as we all know there are a ton of cool game engines out there that people are using to make all kinds of games I've personally spent most of my time developing with unity but I recently tried out a bunch of other game engines to see what I liked about them during the process I found there was one in particular that really stood out to me and I wanted to give it more time and attention that game engine is scratch now I think there's this impression with some people and I was guilty of it too that scratch is just a kid's programming tool and while it's true that MIT created it back in 2007 as a way to introduce kids to coding it has come a long way as a platform and people have used it to make some pretty incredible games if you want to get technical scratch might not even be a game engine it's more of a visual coding language but it has all the functionality of a game engine and most of what people make with it are games so that's how I'm gonna approach using it for the next week I'm gonna go all in on Scratch and try to develop four awesome and memorable games let's get to it the first game I came up with is called happy birthday Corey in this game you play as an adorable cupcaker with a birthday candle the candle is your pride and joy it means everything in the world to you but of course some jerk named Corey comes along and tries to take it from you he thinks that just because it's his birthday he can snuff you out you have to do everything in your power to fend a moth including shooting Sparks at his eyes to make him leave you alone so let's jump into the development I decided to make Vector art for this project so I'm using illustrator first I drew up our player in the candle which will act as our shooter I thought it best to stick with very simple shapes and colors considering the birthday theme then I started drawing out Corey I wanted to give him that kind of classic cartoonish look with rosy cheeks and a silly haircut scratchies is an aspect ratio of 4 to 3 or 480 by 360 pixels for the size of the games so I was careful to think about the proportions of everything from the get-go next I imported the cupcake candle and Corey into scratch as individual Sprites I want Corey to pop up from behind the table at random positions so I use scratches code blocks to make that happen the red Sprites over his eyes are the targets that the player has to shoot in order to fend him off and speaking of shooting I gave the candle the ability to launch projectiles and set up some code blocks to allow the player to rotate and name the candle to get a sense of how you code and scratch here's what the coding blocks on the candle look like this block says when the game starts run the following code then this forever Loop says run what's inside this block every frame of the game indefinitely next this if statement checks to see if the a key is pressed during each one of those frames then this if statement says if the a key is pressed and as long as the angle of the candle is greater than 10 degrees rotate the candle 5 degrees counterclockwise so now we have the ability to rotate the candle to the left then we'll do the same thing on the right and just like that we can rotate the candle in both directions then I went into after effects and animated a spark that will use instead of the Red Blocks for the projectile and I went back to illustrator and Drew four different flame shapes to give the candle some life lastly I wrote a short song to use as background music I decided to deconstruct the Happy Birthday song a bit then make it more frantic by adding in a few runs in some quick but unexpected chord changes I think it fits the theme of the game well if I say so myself okay I think that's basically everything let's fire up the game and play through it foreign as you may have noticed there's candy falling from the ceiling now I decided to add this in later because it felt like the game needed at least one other mechanic to keep it from getting too repetitive and it gives the player something else to do while Corey is hiding after playing through it a bunch I think it turned out to be a great little game and I'm quite happy with it the next game I made is called slap the chicken it's a classic clicker game if you don't know what a clicker game is it's basically just a game where you click on something to rack up a bunch of points the better games tend to have something about the clicking that is very satisfying like in this one a bunch of candy shoots out and as you earn more candy you can get upgrades that accelerate your candy collecting I decided to model the theme of the game after that viral video where YouTuber Lewis Weiss Cooks the chicken by slapping it a bunch of times so in my game you'll start out with a raw chicken breast and you have to keep slapping it until it becomes different forms of cooked chicken along the way you upgrade to different tools that give you more points for each slap to make the game I first planned out how many slaps it would take for you to reach each of the new forms of chicken how much each tool would cost and how much each tool would increase your chicken slapping ability then I started drawing up some art I decided to make Vector art again for this one but because there's not a bunch of gameplay I wanted to spend more time on the visuals so first I created each of the different forms of chicken it was actually really satisfying to texture each of them and try to make them look delicious then I drew each of the tools you start out with just your bare hand then you upgrade to a spoon then you get a spatula then a meat tenderizer a hammer and finally a jackhammer with the chicken and tools done I took some time laying out the gameplay area and figuring out what the user interface and Tool menu would look like then I imported everything into scratch then I got to coding the gameplay it wasn't too hard to set up the code for this one I did have a little trouble getting the buttons on the tool menu to work but eventually I figured it out so let's try the game out [Music] because there isn't a ton of gameplay I tried to keep this game interesting by giving it a lot of Polish and player feedback like when you hover your mouse over the chicken it happily rotates back and forth and when you click on it there's a satisfying slapping sound accompanied by a little hit Sprite that pops up and with every slap your current tool responds and you earn a crisp dollar bill that floats up into your wallet then when you buy a new tool there's a nice magic sound effect if you keep on slapping they're all chicken enough with the upgraded tools to help you along the meat will eventually transform into a full-on live chicken and you win the game so that about does it for chicken slap I think it turned out to be a polished and fun little clicker game for the next game I knew I wanted to make some kind of pixel art side scroller so after giving it some thought I decided that you'll play as a ghost in a graveyard your only ability is that you're able to go invisible and Float through walls to avoid obstacles and your goal is to find flowers throughout the graveyard that you'll decorate your gravestone with so your Legacy isn't forgotten to make the art I used my favorite pixel art program good old days Sprite I started out by drawing the player which wasn't too difficult then I imported the Sprite into scratch and got its left and right movement working then I worked on getting the ghost to disappear the way I got it working is there are two Sprites of the ghost on top of one another one of them is white with a black outline and the other one is transparent with a black outline next I worked on the collisions so that if you become visible within the bounds of a wall you die or I guess you become more dead next I made an enemy for the game it took me a while to get a decent walk animation for him but eventually I was happy enough with it and just like the wall if you touch the groundskeeper or his flashlight you'll die then I worked on the background and scenery I found this nice reference image that I pulled a lot from I really like the Simplicity of the black Silhouettes and the way the Moonlight is reflected on the foreground objects I came up with a bunch of different little graveyard scenes thinking carefully about where I'd placed each of the obstacles and enemies and for the music I decided to ride a spooky Waltz okay let's see how it all came together I'm calling this game immortel and I didn't know this until I looked it up but it's the name for the flower arrangements that mourners put on gravestones which I think is super fitting I'd say this game is mostly a test of your timing I had to think about the colors of the lights because I wasn't sure if it was obvious you could touch this one there we go I'm liking how the visuals came together and some of the little puzzles are actually quite challenging My Hope Is that when you make it back to your grave with all your Immortals you feel accomplished be developed into a bigger more fleshed out experience I had a lot of fun making it and I'm quite proud of the finished product the last scratch game in the lineup is another type of game that I've never made before it's a dating simulator I thought it would be fun to set the player up with my friend Gunther to see if any Sparks would fly the first thing I did was write out what would happen in the story and plan out all the dialogue the way the game works is throughout the day Gunther will ask you questions and you can either respond positively or negatively then based on how you answered if he thinks the two of you hit it off by the end of the date he'll ask you out again next I blocked out where the text boxes will be and where Gunther will stand in the frames then for the actual visuals of the game I wanted to do something different I asked Gunther to model and I took photos of him in different poses surprisingly he was pretty into it then I went online and found some stock photos of industrial areas to use for the backgrounds once everything was imported into scratch it wasn't too hard to code the game however it did take some time to set up the dialogue trees and get the background switching at the right time but soon enough I got it all done and it was working nicely then 4 the music Gunther asked to lay down a smooth electric piano track he'd prepared and he even belted out a couple verses over it the poor guy was basically bearing his whole entire soul who hurt you Gunther who hurt you anyway let's take a look at the finished game to open Gunther creature at a warehouse in a nice part of town and asked you your name then he shows you the sights but when you get close to your destination he wants to surprise you in lucky you the both of you are going on an exciting treasure hunt in the scrapyard your date continues like this with a few more surprises here and there then at the end Gunther decides if the two of you are compatible and wishes you a good night and that's how meeting Gunther a robot dating simulator works so that's it for my four scratch games there's a link to all of them in the description I hope I showed that scratch is quite capable as a game engine and that I could create something unique and fun with it please subscribe if you'd like to see me make more kooky games and I'll see you in the next one hit it Gunther [Music] she loves you [Music] fire [Music] from me [Music]

Channel: Emeral

Views: 114,041

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Id: cbfs9lulWSI

Length: 10min 28sec (628 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 29 2023