MegaGoose

Start Screen
Von Goosemore in flight

Inspiration

Many video game classics are platformers, Scratch was many peoples' introduction into programming, and geese are awesome. Why not combine them all into one?

What it does

Press up-arrow to jump, left to go left, right to go right, and space-bar to shoot freakin' laserbeams. Try to find the star!

How we built it

I drew some sprites in Paint.net, and imported them into Scratch, dragged some blocks together, and now I've got a game.

Challenges we ran into

Where to start... Scratch is great and all, but it is not something you want to use for game development. Programming techniques we take for granted such as method calling and object orientated programming are either incomplete or flat out missing. The biggest challenge has to be collision detection. Scratch exposes methods to detect intersections between two objects, and distance between two objects. But it doesn't let you find angles between objects, or which side of an object you just intersected. There were several solutions to this, each varying in complexity and effectiveness. I chose to draw a box with each edge being a different colour, and check if I am touching said colour, by virtue of it being the easiest to implement.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Actually getting this done. It is 6AM in the morning and I haven't slept since yesterday. And the goose as well. She is pretty.

What we learned

Research your frameworks before committing to a project. A framework not designed for your task is going to give you endless grief. And don't be afraid to use placeholders, just make sure they are of similar size to the real assets. I also learnt some basic pixel art, and the limits of my abilities to produce it.