More Geekery

I'm in the process of evaluating another game programming application for my classroom. I currently use Game Maker, which is free, fairly simple, and (since I've used it for nearly four years now) familiar. It has limitations, but some of my students come up with pretty brilliant games with it. It's been causing a lot of grief this year, so I'm in the market for something new.

At a department meeting a few weeks ago, some of my counterparts from other schools told me about Scratch, a programming language developed by MIT. Apparently you can make games bare-bones simple or incredibly complicated. And it's free, which is important when you're a teacher who's taken a proverbial vow of poverty. So I decided to give it a try and see if I thought I could use it.

Here's what I've managed to come up with:

Learn more about this project

This took many hours. I only had to consult the experts only once--to get the background image scrolling. The rest of it kind of came together as I went; it really took me back to the college days when I would spend hours and hours working obsessively on a CS project.

Here's what I take from this experiment:

1. Scratch is A LOT more like real programming than GM. While GM has useful commands such as "set score", "set lives", "when no more lives" etc you actually have to create the variables and tell them how to behave in Scratch. That is both a positive and negative.
   
2. Sprites cannot go all the way off the screen like they can in GM, and they can't be any bigger then the stage/room (which, by the way, is one-size only). That caused a LOT of frustration while I was getting used to it.
3. Scratch LOOKS more kid-friendly, and you can test your game right there next to the coding as you go along. Can't do that in GM.
4. The sprite editor is a little better in Scratch than in GM, although not by much. I can't precisely control where the x,y coordinates go or the size of the sprite.
5. Animation is controlled through programming. More learning about programming! I love that. On GM you put all the images on the sprite and it'll automatically animate it for you (flipbook style).
6. Scratch games can be uploaded to the Interweb fairly easily.
   
7. You don't have to make just games with Scratch--you could do an animated storybook, a brief cartoon, a greeting card, etc. As simple or as complicated as you want to make it. I'm a big fan of multitasking, and that makes it easy for the kids who just weren't made for programming to still have fun.
   
8. This program is somewhat similar to flash. The interface is totally different, but the end products are similar. Except Scratch is easier to learn than actionscript.

The bottom line is this: It takes longer to program my standard games in Scratch (scrolling shooter and platform game in particular) because you have to do so much programming yourself whereas GM has a lot of basic game functions built in. However, as a teaching tool, I think Scratch is better. I like the Interface for middle school students better. And it's been a lot of fun. I have another game programming language to evaluate but I just haven't been motivated to get into it yet...it looks like too much for middle school. So I think I'm going to switch over to Scratch. Next year, after I've spent more time figuring it out.

It's really too bad. I've spent many hours this school year FINALLY making tutorials and powerpoints and worksheets etc to go with Game Maker. I guess that's the problem with teaching technology--unlike history or math or English, it's constantly changing and so I have to constantly change my curriculum, which takes a lot more time than I have available. Oh well, at least it's fun!