Worlds As Real

Learning Scratch: Day 3

The last few hours that I worked on this project were juggled around family time, holiday cooking, and chasing around (and being chased by) my two-year-old niece. I was able to download the Scratch software on a borrowed computer as well as an image editor with which I changed the colors of the “enemy” snowsuits.

In trying to simplify the user interface as much as possible, I removed almost everything from the typical “heads up” display. Instead of an “ammo” count, there’s a pile of snowballs in the corner. Instead of a health meter, the screen gets progressively bluer, as a sign of how cold you are. Your score isn’t displayed until the game over screen. I really like the way this worked out, especially the health status. The gameplay itself, which involves a lot of ducking behind your fort, is more of a simulation of a snowball fight than your typical point-and-click shooter, and I like that aspect of it, even though as a game it might not be as fast-paced and fun as other shooters. I wasn’t out to make a popular game, I was out to see how Scratch worked.

I tweaked the timing of the “enemy” movements until I was pleased with it, and then uploaded it to the Scratch website, upon which…. it crashed Firefox. It was also crashing Safari. Updating Safari seemed to help, and it works fine for me with Windows XP. My code wasn’t perfect, and there were a number of things I could think of that could contribute to a crash (audio handling being first on the list), it would have taken me a while to figure out what was the problem. I found out that a lot of what people upload doesn’t work from the Scratch website and you have to download it. I can live with that.

The final result:

I’m satisfied with the way it came out. It feels pretty solid to me. Even though it took me three times as long as I first predicted, 24-or-so hours to make a simple, fleshed-out game is pretty darn good. I’m not satisfied with the display of games on Scratch’s website; the player is buggy, and it’s not easy to find a game amongst the many, many, many uploads. Scratch is not going to be a game development solution for me, but I will probably use it to make super-quick prototypes, and I’m going to pass on its existence to the people I know who want to make games in their spare time.

You can see the finished game here: http://scratch.mit.edu/projects/natures_work/817332

Learning Scratch: Day Two

After Day One I was busy for two days. When I started back up I didn’t track my progress as well.

My first priority was creating enough art and sound assets, temporary or otherwise, to be able to finish the coding. I wanted to finish this game before I lost enthusiasm for the project, and the next day I was going to be driving to my sister’s house for a few days, so any work I did on the project after this day would have to be done on someone else’s laptop.

When working on a game I like to get the music done and in-game pretty early, in order to test and make sure that it isn’t going to drive me crazy if I hear it over and over. I wanted the background music to be reminiscent of Vince Guaraldi’s Peanuts Christmas music. Reason is my go-to software for quick MIDI-based compositions. I loaded up a piano and, utilizing my training in jazz piano, stitched together some Guaraldi-sounding melodies. I accidentally stumble across some chords that are much to slow but that I like for the title music. In order to help prevent music burnout during gameplay, I comp three different melodies to the same chord progression, each about 30 seconds long, and set up a loop within the game that will randomly choose which piece to play next. As much of my background is music-related, this was the easy part of the project for me.

My roommates left the apartment to go to dinner and I took advantage of the relative quietude (I live next to a freeway) to record the sound effects. I wasn’t going for perfection here, and not only that, but I had forgotten that I had swapped SD cards between my Roland R09 digital recorder (my go-to device for quick-and-dirty recording) and a camera, leaving me with only 64MB of space, or about 5 minutes at the lowest resolution I was willing to go. (I knew that Scratch was going to compress the heck out of all of the sounds anyway, so I wasn’t too concerned about quality.) As it turned out, I emptied and filled the card about three times. Five minutes is not a lot of time when you are trying to record taunts, snowball impacts, and other such sounds. I used an actual winter coat for coat-related sounds; packing snowballs was squishing cornstarch with a spoon; and snow scatter explosions turned out to be a small bag of nutritional yeast, I think. (I tried out a lot of different substances, so it could have been puffed rice or oatmeal.)

And now it was on to the art. Of all the skills required to make a game from scratch, I’m weakest in this department. I will hopefully find an artist that clicks with me sooner rather than later.

Non-game-related side note, yet relevant to the game creation process: not only was I traveling the next day, so was my girlfriend. She would be going away for the next few weeks, so we wanted to get together before she left. I also wanted to get this game done ASAP. There were some misunderstandings, I brought my work over to her apartment because I thought she was going to be packing and we could hang out while we were both working. Had we both communicated better and earlier we might have prevented some of the drama that was created. As it turned out, we worked things out, but it’s clear that defining boundaries between work and our relationship is going to be something that’s going to come up again soon. And now back to the development proper.

There are four more-or-less identical “enemies” in this game, and I figured if I could make all of the art for one of them, I could use that temporarily for all three and use it as a template for the other there, altering the art while I was away. I’m not a huge fan of drawing with a mouse, so I borrowed a Wacom tablet from my roommate. It was my first time using a tablet, and it was a really awesome experience. All those years of doodling in high school helped me out here and I had my art assets — neutral, taunt, ready to throw, throwing, hit, snow forts, snow balls — done in maybe five or six hours. I really wanted to get this game done before I left, so I pulled my first all-nighter in a long time. I watched the sun rise as I added the code to make the animations and sounds play. Right around 8AM, the latest I could work (I still had to exercise, shower, and pack before leaving at 10AM), I finished the code. The timing of events would still need to be tuned, and the enemies all had the same art, but the code was done; I had been working on the project for about 20 hours, in total.