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Round 3; Session 3 recap

Today we were one person shy …Rose wasn’t able to join us due to other projects of hers piling up.  However   we decided to carry on anyway  (with Davin’s  wonderful  snacks helping  us to move past this loss)  and show what we had come up with for modifying some of the simple games that come with the Scratch game-maker.

Now for the games!

 

 First Miguel amazed us all with his scroll game modification epic The Kraken Dreams which had the player assume the role of a giant floating squid that appeared to be attacking a quaint European village, or at least devouring its starry night-time vista.  The squid would grow as it consumed the sky’s stars but it had to watch out for the many floating Zeppelins for bump into them, much to the dismay of the horrified captains, would send the ships crashing to the ground and also decrease the size and health of the squid.  The squid had a nice little animation to it as it gingerly floated up and down in the sky. The group felt it would be fun to get to eat increasingly large objects as the squid grew to ungainly proportions.

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Next up was Jim’s very funny take on the scroll game which saw the first incarnation of Plastico Baggara, the revolutionary trash-heap hoping red wind-bag… the point being to get the bag to high enough   ground that it can intercept the seagull (a bags natural enemy of course) to asphyxiate it…   it was pretty satisfying to watch the poor bird drop like a stone when hit. We talked about ways to make it a bit more challenging, such as having the seagull’s droppings be a potential hazard, as too many poops in the bag could weigh it down too much to keep it airborne. Jim also revealed a former Scratch project that got banned. Apparently baby’s first bowel movement, nursing breasts and creepy teddy bears with bloody knives don’t bode well in the Scratch community… good to know.

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Jason showed us a few very unfinished attempts at a Scratch modification which included a Pong mod of a devastated city containing a monster defending itself from a UFO attacker, which used photos of a toy and a smoke detector respectively and a photo from an installation of Jason’s of a cardboard city in ruins as the background.  He also showed an attempt at a mod of the RPG template which had an artsy dude waking up late in the day in his messy studio apartment to then scavenge the street looking for trash to make art with, another version of the RPG was started with two artist characters reuniting after having   engaged in a performance project where one slept for 30 years while the other stayed awake to create much art.

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Davin showed us his hilarious Grab for that Chedda Yo!  which was his mod of the chomping fish game. He had replaced the larger predator fish with a skinny mans well-dressed arm, which flailed around trying to grasp Canadian currency ($5s, $20s, $50s) that floated  in front of a bank vault.  The group felt that the game could use a counter of some sort so the player can see the tally of cash collected –either showing the actually amount or with an icon like a wallet getting fatter as more is grabbed… also the money seemed to fly in mainly from the left side of the screen and we felt that randomizing the cash flow would be a good idea.

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Ben then showed us his dreary (in a good way) apocalyptic mod of the Pong-ish template called The Beach at the end of Forever. He was inspired by Cormac McCarthy’s  book The Road, and it showed, as he captured the gritty feel with a palette of washed out grays and browns. He depicted The Boy from the novel on a beach playing a solitary game of volleyball.    The artwork was lovely with a half-submerged shipped resting off in the back ground , however it did lead to a conversation about stylistic choices as Ben had created a pixilated character and ball and a more painterly background. Ben wanted to rework things a bit so that the ball had more of a sense of gravity to it.

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 Are assignment for next week is to polish up our Scratch games and post them for the others to play and comment on, and also pick which game maker program we’d like to use for our final project and let the others know why we chose it.  Also, Miguel is going to be out of town for our next meeting so we decided to skip the in-person, just posting on the interweb instead, and add another meeting in October.

 

 

 


One Response to “Round 3; Session 3 recap”

  1. Here are the changes I made to my Scratch game now subtly renamed, GRAB THAT CHEDDA YO!

    http://scratch.mit.edu/projects/buckyfuller/280456

    – added a score based on the bill value
    – made each bill have a unique grab sprite
    – tried to limit arm movement (failed?)
    – better random relocation of bills after grab

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