Scratch offers a fun way of getting introduced to programming and interactive media design. Within minutes of starting the program, you can see the first results of your work. Visual feedback comes early and often, making high-level, abstract concepts a lot easier to understand.
Even without a specific plan in mind, it's fun to play and experiment with the software. You are always discovering and learning something new, and even failed projects can have funny or spectacular results.
Since Version 2.0, Scratch has moved from a desktop application to an online interface. Scratch 2.0 also includes many new and exciting features, which makes creating more advanced games possible.
This book presents a series of fully-realized interactive projects to work on. It will teach you how to build great games with lots of depth. The final results will be close to production level games. This book not only introduces you to the new features of Scratch 2.0, but also introduces you to interactive media design in general. You can take the lessons learned here and apply them to create games with tool sets other than Scratch.
We hope you enjoy working on the projects in this book. May they inspire you to create even better games!
Project 1, Blowing Things Up!, builds a simple game involving a cannon and some targets. You will learn about placing sprites, building scripts, and setting the game in motion.
Project 2, Beating Back the Horde, teaches you how to create multiple enemies and how to move them along a predefined path. You will also learn about drag-and-drop and click mouse controls.
Project 3, Start Your Engines, shows you how to build a keyboard controlled game. The game will showcase simple collisions between objects and how to handle them. You will also learn to create and use a timer.
Project 4, Space Age, shows you how to build a game that is extensive and configurable in terms of level of difficulty. This game comes complete with spaceship, shield, scoreboard, enemy, and an ample supply of ammunition.
Project 5, Shoot 'Em Up, shows you how to build a fast-paced action game with waves of enemies to defeat. You will learn about setting up movement patterns and speeds for both the player character and enemies.
Project 6, Building a Worthy Boss, shows you how to finish your side-scrolling shooter with a memorable boss encounter. You will learn to design an epic finish for a game level.
Project 7, Creating a Level Editor, teaches you how to create a tile editor and automatically build tile-based maps with it.
Project 8, Dungeon Crawl, involves you using the tile editor from the previous project to build an action RPG. You will also learn how to create multiple levels and different enemies.
Project 9, Hunger Run, shows you how to build a fast-paced auto-scrolling platform game. This project explains how horizontal and vertical scrolling work.
Project 10, Sprites with Characters, will dive into creating complex sprites using Scratch 2.0's vector editor. Piece by piece, we will build a robot and add animation scripts. The finished sprite can be imported to other Scratch projects.
Appendix, The New Scratch Interface, will give you an overview of the new Scratch 2.0 interface and will show you some of the new features you can play with.