Help our monkey friend find some nanners by making his way through the maze. Be careful though, touching some of the maze walls will send you back to the starting point! https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/712763700/
When we were assigned a project to make a video game, I was worried that I wasn’t going to be able to produce anything good (or anything, for that matter). Making video games was so foreign to me and I had no idea where to start. Some of the resources provided in the assignment were Ink, Construct, Sploder, Scratch, Twine, and Puzzlescript.
The first websites I looked at were ink and construct. I was instantly intimidated, purely by the way that the home page looks:
After that, I went to Sploder and clicked through to attempt to make a game. The only issue is that it kept asking me for Flash, which ended in 2020. So that site was also a no-go. I finally landed on Scratch, which seemed to work properly and was more user friendly. After deciding to use this site, I tried to come up with a video game. I was trying to think of something that hadn’t been done before, but there are so many games that exist now and that made it difficult to come to a decision. I decided to finally make a maze game, because I assumed it would be a good beginner-level creation in my video game making career. I originally followed a tutorial in order to have the site generate a maze path for me. However, I followed these instructions 3 times and it never worked the same way that it did on the video.
So this led me to having to manually draw out the maze by hand. Under the backdrops section, I used the line tool to create various paths on the screen.
I thought about what I wanted to add to it after my maze was outlined. I was leaning towards a dinosaur sprite, but I saw that others had already done that. I looked through the options and saw a monkey and banana sprite, and that’s how I came to the conclusion that I would have a monkey find his way through the maze to get the banana. That gave it more of a “goal” feeling to me, rather than just going through a maze. The way that I set up the controls were as follows:
I made it so that when you use the arrow keys, it moves you around on the background grid by 5. Then I set it up to wear the green flag starts you out in the top left corner of the grid. I also programmed it so that when you hit the color black (which would be hitting the line in the maze), it would send you back to the starting point. I have noticed that it sometimes works and sometimes doesn’t. I played the game myself a few times and it was a hit or miss on if it would work properly. So, I’m blaming that one on the scratch website and assuming it was a glitch or lag if it didn’t work sometimes. You can also see that I put in that getting to the bananas would play a chomp sound and display a message showing that you had won the game.
Overall this website wasn’t too difficult to navigate through. I struggled with the first tutorial I tire to use, mentioned above. I also struggled with some of my controls randomly working or not working. I also want to add that I did intend to add a timer function to this game. I planned to only allow for 45 seconds to get through the maze, and I actually did have that coded in before. But, I could not figure out how to program the timer to stop when you reached the bananas. The timer just kept counting down even if you reached the goal, so you’d “win” by reaching the bananas, but then the timer would hit zero and you’d “lose”. Since I couldn’t figure that portion out, I decided to delete it all together. The fun part was thinking of what sprite I wanted to use, picking sound effects, and choosing the messages that would be displayed when you completed the maze. I was surprised at how easy it ended up being, since I was so nervous to do this project at the beginning, and am very pleased with my end result! Hopefully it was fun for others to play!
