How To

Register

The first step in joining the competition is to register so that we can send you updates and of course award you the winning prize.

The Initial Idea

The best place to start is with understanding the insects which are going to be part of the project, see the insects section.

Then you should get a big piece of paper and write down all the crazy ideas you have for the game. See the brainstorming 1 and brainstorming 2.

A Winning Strategy

Once you have a load of great ideas you, want to see how practical they are. The first step is to decide on a type of game. This studio has a large number of different formats that you can consider. Different types of Scratch games.

We have found that with insects the following format of games work well:

A quest to find food, collecting points as you go around
A survival game against predators and hazards
Growing an insect population to get a winning number

However there are many formats which will work and the more creative you are the more fun you will have.

Remember when choosing the game think of:

How fun it would be to make and play
Is it practical to make
Is there enough guidance around to build this type of game

Controlling the Game

Generally a Scratch game is controlled by the things you measure, these are called variables. The type of things that you could measure are:

Health – affected by food level or damage or time
Number – the number of insects alive in your family
Time – It is always good to measure time as it creates urgency in a game
Number of points – these can be awarded for collecting items

A good explanation of variables can be found here. Once you have something measured you can make decisions about them such as “are you still alive – health =0?” or have you won? More about the use of variables can be found in the code help section.

Goodies and Baddies

The balance of goodies and baddies in a game is an essential part of creating excitements. Lets look at the type of things which might fall into the category of goodies:

Poo for dung beetles
Pollen and nectar for hover flies
Aphids for hover flies
Flowers for hover flies

On the other hand baddies for insects can be:

Predators
Insecticide
Natural hazard like freezing temperatures at the wrong time of year
Fly swats
Lack of a range of flowers

You can get an idea of what is good and bad for each insect in the basic facts section of the insect page.

Many rooms or levels

Firstly, great games can be made without changing rooms or levels, so only do this if you are really confident in Scratch.

As you progress with your skills, you might be tempted to make a game with different levels or rooms. Here are the ways in which you can design a multi- level game:

Simple level – Redo the same task but with less time or the baddies having more speed
Medium level – Change backdrops and make the tasks more complex
Complex level – Change backdrops and populate the different backdrops with different sprites which make the game tasks harder to achieve

A simple way of adding levels changes is shown by Maria Gettel. You could also make a continuous rolling scene which is explained in this video by McGuy.

If you want a game with many different rooms which are populated differently look at the online resources for the hedgehog conservation game in this site.

Good Graphics

All games need good graphics to make them attractive. We have supplied you a full library of animated sprites which you can use to make your game. See the sprite library.

Endings

Whatever you do, you need to have a good ending. This can be achieved by having winning and losing backdrops being displayed. Display the persons score – you could even comment if this is a good, fair or poor score.