Scratch

So, you may have noticed that I am doing all of my blogging at once!! Yes, this is because I have no time anymore to do anything but interventions of some sort!!

Scratch - I thought that I loved this program, and could talk about this program for hours! Well, the more hours I spend using this program to create my game, the more hours I spend thinking - what was I thinking!!! This program is neat to create one game, however, when you are a dork like me and want to create a game with 4 games, it gets a little nutty. It also enlighted me to how much my kids have no clue about keyboarding or where keys are located. During one of my play testing, the kid was key happy, and my game took a turn for the worse! In my game, you get to choose 1 of the 4 games to play. Each game is separate, however, I had to code it so you push certain keys for this game...then other certain keys for this game, so that no keys over lap. Because, if you hit the letter a during one game, it could ignite a sound, speech, or who knows what from one of the other games. When a kid pushes a few keys at once, like my play tester decided to do, many sounds occur at once! Which equals me going....oh no! I have no idea how to freeze those keys, so that they can only occur a response during it's individual game. My guess is, there isn't a way.

On the plus side, I was able to use different text to speech tools to add voice to my game, so that I didn't have to record my voice over and over again. That part was fun and cute. Scratch also allows you to have movement of characters either around the screen or even to do a dance. It allowed me to have many different backgrounds and images.

Bad side - it has taken me hours that I can't even count. My guess is about 30. Which is because when you play it to review it, you have to start from the beginning. I like to play it, then when it makes me mad, I have to change it. Or when I get a cool idea when I'm sleeping, then I have to add it to the game.

I am very glad that we had to have play testers that were students. I had tons of adults play my game, but they didn't have that many suggestions. Now when I had students play it, quite a few light bulbs light up because there were many things I had to change.

The really neat thing is that there is a scratch website in which people post projects, games, and discuss on the forums. You can ask questions on there, and get a response by the end of the day. That was very helpful. So were the projects. I had a really hard time with my matching game, and there were 2 on that website that helped me solve it. If you really like a game you see, you can download it to your own computer and save it as well. There are some really great games on there, that are wayyyyyy above my skill level!