Everyone Makes Games

Video games can be playful, weird, exciting, curious, magical, and even downright scary. We enjoy playing games because they act like windows into other worlds, worlds that move and change as we play with them, worlds whose rules are different than our own. (Sometimes these rules seem to make more sense than our world’s.) Games can be places we visit for a short time or places we get lost in for long stretches at a time. Through games, we can try on other personas and explore different perspectives.

Whatever games might mean for you, you should know that you can make your own games. And it’s a lot easier than you might think! The Make Your Own Video Games series shows you how to make fun, interactive games from scratch using a few tools.

What You’ll Need

To create the games in this series, you’ll need the following:

• Access to a computer
• An internet connection

That’s it! In this book, we’ll work with Scratch, a tool that makes it easy to draw characters that interact by snapping together simple code blocks to build fun, weird games.

Before you learn how to download Scratch and begin making your own games, let’s first explore some history behind the games you enjoy today.

A Brief History of Games

Games have been around forever, or at least since the start of civilization. In fact, our oldest ancestors made their own games out of sheep’s bones (the very first dice!). They used seeds and some holes in the dirt to make the game we now call Mancala. Tic-Tac-Toe was first played over 3,000 years ago in Egypt!

Games existed long before other activities, such as writing, painting, and 3D movies. It seems like people were born to play. Whenever a group of people agree to play by a certain set of rules, a new game is born. As these games pass on to new players, the new group puts its unique spin on it. For example, a Tag player might wonder, Wouldn’t Tag be more exciting if you could rescue people who’ve been tagged? And just like that, a new rule is born: games grow and change over time like weird plants.

Games that are designed by a group of people instead of just one person are called folk games. No one person invented Tag. More likely, Tag had a million different authors who each added their own little touches. This is why so many different versions of Tag, such as Flashlight Tag, Freeze Tag, and Kick the Can, exist today. All it took was someone to come up with another, more fun way to play the game, and the rest was history.

The mobile games on your phones are designer games, which were made by a single person or a team of people. They aren’t folk games, but they’re still the result of people playing games and trying to come up with different ways to improve a game or create new games using their imagination.

While playing a game, have you ever thought, This game would be so much cooler if it just had this? If so, congratulations! You are a game designer.

Who Makes Video Games?

In the 1960s, computers were the size of an entire room: these huge computers were called mainframes. Because computers were so expensive and complicated, only a few people could use them to make video games.

One of the oldest video games, Spacewar, was written by punching holes into paper cards and then putting the cards into a computer. After writing out the code on paper, you then had to figure out which holes to punch on a card so the computer could read and understand the cards. If any of the holes were wrong, you had to start over and repunch all the cards!

As you can imagine, computers were very tricky to use back then. They were also so big and expensive that only schools could afford them. In fact, most of the video games made in the 1960s and 1970s were designed by students at universities, such as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

But these students were not being taught game design in school. They were being taught serious computer programming. However, in between classes, they snuck away to the computer labs and figured out how to make video games because they thought games were cool. They disguised their games as Serious Computer Programs because the administrators would delete any programs that looked like games, calling them a waste of space.

Today, we remember some of those early games but not many of the Serious Computer Programs. Keep that idea in mind if someone complains about how much time you spend making games. People might forget the serious stuff, but they’ll usually play a game for a very long time.

Computers have changed a lot since the 1960s. Now, you carry a computer in your pocket—your smartphone—which can do so much more than a huge mainframe computer ever could and is much faster. These pocket-size computers are also less expensive and easier to use.

You’ll learn how easy it is to make your own video games using free, simple tools like Scratch, which hundreds of people have used.

These are people of different colors and genders, young and old. People who are sick and people who are well, those who have gone to college and those who haven’t. People who like cats, people who like dogs, and those who like both. All kinds of people. So the answer to the question Who makes videogames? is everyone!

Why Make a Video Game?

People create video games for many different reasons. For example, maybe you’ve tried drawing comics, and it was fun. Maybe you’ve tried writing stories, and that was fun, too. Perhaps you enjoy arts and crafts as well as making music. Odds are, if you’re creative, you’ll also enjoy making games.

Another reason to create games is that you really like them and want to learn how they work. Making your own games is the best way to understand how game designers make decisions when they create your favorite games.

If you don’t like games very much, that’s okay, too! Perhaps you can make a new type of game no one has ever seen before—a game that is totally different from the currently available games. Gamers need to be challenged a little.

If you already know you want to be a game developer, you could try to make games that kids will love to play for generations, which will inspire them to make games.

For me, making games is exciting and new, even after all the time I’ve spent on them. Whenever I think I’m done, a new idea pops into my head. I can’t stop thinking about it until it’s out of my head And the only way to get the idea out is to make it a reality. When I create a new game, it feels like I’m creating something I can share with the world. It feels awesome!

There are a million and a half different reasons to make a game, and they’re all great reasons as long as they excite you.

What Should My Game Be About?

Games can be about anything. Really, it’s true. They can be about big things, small things, important things, silly things, people and places, your mom or dad, your brother or sister, or your cat or dog.

They can be about things that happened to you or things you wish had happened to you. You could make a game about your weird dreams, about a funny story you heard, or about robots taking over the Earth. Or perhaps your game can be about the network of secret tunnels leading from your basement to the center of the Earth (you know about those, right?) and the monsters that live in them. And the picnics they have down there.

You could just try re-creating games that you already play and like. Make your own game about the dude in the funny overalls with the mustache (Mario). For example, what would Mario do on his day off? Would he go on a picnic? Do you think he has a cat?

Although there are already games about almost everything, there is always room for more ideas. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise!

About Scratch

Scratch is a creative tool that was developed with kids in mind, but anyone can make games with it. It’s easy to put together a simple game or animated story in Scratch. You can even draw your own characters and art directly into your project!

How Much Does Scratch Cost?

Scratch is free! Making your game, publishing your game, and putting it on the internet where other people can play it doesn’t cost a thing. (Of course, someone in your home needs to pay for internet access, or you can try using a computer at your school or library.)

Do I Need to Know How to Program?

No, you don’t need to know how to program! Scratch uses a system of simple building blocks similar to LEGO blocks that snap together to tell your game characters what to do. Because the blocks snap together only in certain ways, it’s easy to tell where the blocks are supposed to go. Coding can be scary because sometimes your program might not work, and you’ll have no idea why. But Scratch’s snap-together system eliminates 90 percent of those situations.

What If I Already Love Programming?

If programming is your jam, you can really take off and run with Scratch. Although Scratch’s snap-together blocks are simple and easy to use, they use the same ideas as any other programming language. Whether you know how to use branching, variables, loops, and so on or need to learn, Scratch is a great introduction to all of these concepts!

Alternative Tools

If you don’t like Scratch, check out the two other books in this series: Make Your Own Twine Games! and Make Your Own PuzzleScript Games! Twine is ideal for telling stories with words, and PuzzleScript is best for making little puzzle-based games. But you should try to learn Scratch, too! The more tools you know how to work with, the more versatile you’ll be as a creator. The best artists can pick up and use any tool to craft something that matches their vision.