A somewhat advanced platformer written in the very simple programming language aimed at children, Scratch.
Scratch uses visual blocks to code, and has a lot of other limitations and performance problems, so I tried writing a game using real-world game development techniques such as a Game Loop, update and render functions, and a camera. After I made a mini-engine, I wrote a 2D Platformer with a large map (384x32 tiles, but width is expandable), and many stars hidden that you can try to collect (SMB64-style, but less effects). There's also an external level editor, by using a plain text file and a NodeJS program to convert it's format into something the scratch program can read, and also handles partial auto-tiling. The game can be played here
Written for the "Hack the Northeast" Hackathon.
- scratch
- nodejs
- bash scripting
All the art, code, and (lack of) music was created by Dave Caruso.
- Be on UNIX (Mac or Linux) or Windows WSL
- Run
./pack.shto pack src to an sb3 file. - Run
./unpack.shto unpack an sb3 file back to src. - Don't touch source manually unless merging or something.
As a shortcut, you can use ./import-downloads.sh to copy project.sb3
from your ~/Downloads folder and run ./pack.sh.
- Edit level.txt
- Run
./level-edit.js packto pack the level.raw, which can be loaded via the Tilemap Sprite.
You can also unpack raw level codes, by using the export function in the Tilemap Sprite.
- Put the raw code in level.raw
- Run
./level-edit.js unpackto do the reverse of pack
_ Blank Space
# Solid
^ One Way Solid (Up)
< One Way Solid (Left)
> One Way Solid (Right)
v One Way Solid (Down)
x Death Floor
X Death Block
| Checkpoint Column
r Inactive Red Block
R Active Red Block
f Red Switch (remember this as key under R)
g Inactive Green Block
G Active Green Block
b Green Switch (remember this as key under B)
O Star
It would be cool to have a larger level with more things to explore, and do more stuff with onscreen sprite clones; Right now it's only the player sprite clone.
I'd also like to look into more git compatibility with scratch. This system works, but I'm not sure how merges will happen, I never was able to test the conflict.
The final thing that would be cool to look at would be the file format of Scratch 3. I see that each sprite, variable, event, costume, gets a unique id that is kind of unreadable, especially for image and audio filenames. It would be cool to have a "deobfuscation tool" to rename all the long ids of assets to what they are in the actual project, and get a nicer source view.