Egg Catcher!
Link to the game:
https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/512064943
When I first saw the assignment to make a game, I was intimidated. I’ve never made a digital game before, so my first instinct was to create a “choose your own adventure” game. It seemed simple enough; all I had to do was come up with a few quick decision-based storylines. When I started working on it though, I realized I made the wrong choice. I struggle with writing and storytelling, so I quickly ran out of ideas and steam. I could have kept pushing through to finish the game, but I wasn’t happy with what I had made and I felt like this sort of game wouldn’t be my best work. If I had continued with this route, I would have easily turned my game in on time, but I decided to take a risk and try create a traditional app-style videogame on Scratch. I knew that meant I would have to turn the game in late, but it was worth it for me. It took time, but I learned a new skill and made a working game!
To start, I browsed through Scratch just looking at the backgrounds, characters, and objects to get ideas for my game. I picked out the simple daytime background because I wanted the game to have a traditional, minimalistic feel. I decided I would make a game where you had to catch falling objects. I thought it would be a good idea because it’s complex enough to keep the player engaged, but easy enough to figure out how to create on my own. It took me a while to get familiar with Scratch; there was a lot of exploration and trial and error until I was able to start piecing things together. My original idea was to have eggs fall from the sky, which I successfully did, but as I was adding more code I accidentally made it so the eggs went in random directions. After testing the game like that, I realized I actually preferred it that way because it was a bit more challenging, so I kept that code in. There was a lot of experimentation while trying to create this in order to figure out what worked best. At first, I had the player control the bowl with the mouse but after playing the game like that, I felt like it would be better to use the arrow keys instead. I made a lot of other changes like this as I developed the game. My final code looks completely different than my initial code; I just had to keep testing things out until the game ran the way I wanted it. I’m really happy with the final product and I would love to add to it in the future. I think sound effects, an ending animation, and adding levels would make the game much better. I had fun creating it and I’m excited to take computer science classes next semester where I can learn how to use actual code, rather than plug-in coding.
