Preface

When we were in first grade, our mother picked us up early from school and told us that our arcade game education started that afternoon. We played Pac-Man at Chuck E. Cheese’s on a large arcade cabinet while she told us about the games from her childhood. It was hard for us to see because the arcade cabinet was so tall, and we were so short.

Fast forward to fifth grade. We got an Intellivision Flashback machine, and our mother sat us down to play a round of Astrosmash. It’s a game where colorful asteroids fall down the screen and you shoot them with little white line “bullets.” It was her favorite game from childhood, the one that she wanted so badly but had to go over to her friend’s house to play.

Although it wasn’t complicated compared to the games we play now, it was still a lot of fun to blast the rocks apart and avoid being crushed by the falling debris. Plus it was cool to see what our mother played when she was our age.

And these games played a huge role in the games we have today. All the games we know and love, like Asphalt 8 and Candy Crush and Monument Valley, wouldn’t be possible without these arcade predecessors paving the way.

We realized we could recreate these games together in Scratch, an open source programming platform maintained by Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), which made our mother happy. But we also realized that we could teach you, too, and you could make your own versions, either with your parents (so they have a reason to drone on and on about video games from when they were your age) or on your own.

In this book, you’ll learn how to program your own video games as well as draw your own unique characters. By doing the exercises in this book, you’ll also walk away with general programming concepts that will help you even outside of the Scratch environment—concepts like XY coordinates, variables, and conditional statements.

Don’t worry if math isn’t your strong suit or if you’ve never written a line of code in your life. This book will give you all the tools you need to get started.

That’s what this book is all about. Get ready to dive into game design, pixel art, and programming.