Last week Thomas participated in Tech Camp. On Friday, I went to his final presentation. He made a Scratch game where you have to find the different one. I realized Scratch’s availability and decided to make a game based on The Lost Island of Pirate, Curses and Dinosaurs.
When I created my free Scratch account, I didn’t know what to call it. Thomas suggested we call it Stolen Phone Productions, the name we put on all our videos. I changed the account name to StolenPhone.
The first game I created is Flight of the Pteranodon. I started with typing Dinosaurs into the Sprite Editor. The Pteranodon’s looked pretty cool. Some simple animation gives them the look of flying. I imported original outwork from The Lost Island as the background. I could work on the actual gameplay on this game a little more, but I think it is fun for a first game.
The next game was Avoid the Carnotaurus. In this one, I thought importing some of the art for Sprites would be cool. I used the coins and the cups from the book; they look pretty cool. The dropping mechanism was my design*. Then I used the standard Scratch Sprite as the dinosaur. I wanted it to be a Carnotaurus so I added some horns on the head. From there, I just needed the scoring mechanism and the music.
These games were fun to develop. I had to watch a bunch of videos to figure out how to do things like scores and final scores, but I got it. Thomas also helped a lot. He had to teach me how to use Scratch.
Let me know if you have any questions or suggestions. I would love to hear your thoughts. Is there anything I can improve? New game ideas would also be fun (although I am new to Scratch, they would have to be simple). Or better yet, develop your own games based on the book and send them to me. I will post them on the website. I would love to have more user-driven content on this website.
Special thanks to Spencer Liriano Navarro, the illustrator of The Lost Island of Pirates, Curses and Dinosaurs.
*The coins, cup, and Carnotaurus in Avoid the Carnotaurus game use the same drop mechanisms. An invisible sprite roams the X-axis along the top. Regularly, the Sprites drop invisible clones that fall to a random location on the X-axis. Pretty cool, hu?