This was a co-build experience with my son (12). He created all the art and music and inspired ideas for this game based on a physical game he played during summer camp.
There’s about 35 hours of work involved, I knew Typescript but was pretty new to the format/structure/tools of Makecode Arcade.
You are small band of pirates set out to take over the “world” by conquering each island one by one (and of course taking the treasures!). Beware however rival pirates may try to steal the loot that’s on your ship, be sure to stash your earnings on your “Treasure Island”!
My son also created a manual in the style of Sega Genesis games to help you along: https://filedn.com/lBGdVIcGwB1jmkjESIRyfuL/Greedy%20Pirates%20Manual.pdf
Lessons/wishes:
- I’d love for a more “developer” reference page similar to other JS/TS libraries (I realize I may be an exception using Typescript vs blocks)
- We used Namespaces for “scenes” and Classes for objects within the scene. There’s a lot of maintenance of destroys and inits, lots of bugs arose from forgetting to destroy or remove things from one scene to the next.
- The pixel art editor is good enough for basic work but there were many times my son wanted to use Asprite and import. Importing images from other applications feels like a hack with that not-so-supported import tool.
- Merging/co-working on projects requires a full-time developer that knows what they are doing. I’d love to see ways to “block-ify” ways for people to collaborate and work on the same project together. Maybe leverage the same socket style real-time foundation you have for multiplayer?
- Multiplayer is awesome! A little laggy but you are able to sit down and laugh at a game together which is an awesome addition to Makecode Arcade, thank you so much for this!
- This thing does not at all fit on a Meowbit… at one point it fit to upload but crashed due to out of memory. Future us will make a “slimmed down” version. Once we realized we couldn’t fit it on the meow bit we just went all in and made assets galore (videos, etc).
- Near the end of the build process our editors were starting to crash (2017 MacBook Air i7s). We figured we pushed the envelope a little too far 😬
- Makecode Arcade will never become as popular as Scratch if it doesn’t embrace the social nature of these things. My son has done so many “remixes” of games in Scratch but when you show up at Makecode Arcade you are not presented with games you wish to play/mess-around-with. Even this DevJam isn’t entirely advertised all that well. I’d love to see Makecode Arcade become the awesome it can be but without the social side of it, people will not pay attention. Makecode Arcade is clearly better in all ways compared to GBStudio, Scratch, etc in my mind.
Thank you SO much for building this tool and the last two weeks were a blast. I look forward to future DevJams and updates to the platform.