scratch-old-games

My old Scratch Games

In 2020, during High School, I was exploring technology, as usual, doing whatever came to my mind, from a simple website to a game. For sure, I hadn’t all the technological background I have today, so it’s kinda embarrassing to see how many mistakes I did in my code, but it’s also a nice piece of my history. Comparing the code I did at that time with my recent projects, it’s obvious how much I’ve evolved.

At that time, I was doing CS50 and having some classes about some code related topics in school.

In CS50 during the first week (week 0), we had to build a game with scratch, exploring as much as we could the tool. And, believe or not, at school our teacher challenged us to build simple games in scratch too.

Some years passed and I’d forgotten these projects between my old backups. However, today (January 4th - 2025) I was organizing them and, surprisingly, I got across with some .sb3 files (scratch format). So here I am with a big nostalgia and urged to explain you everything about these master pieces of technology.

CS50 Project

During Week 0 in CS50, You’re introduced to computer science. David J. Malan starts presenting some basic logic, conditionals, loops and some Scratch specific things.

After the class, you’re challenged to create a game or interactive story to submit as a homework.

My solution for this problem set was a Pacman inspired game, which your goal is to get as much coins as you can without touching the monsters.

To make it different from Pacman, green areas were added to increase your speed and red areas to reduce it.

The game has as many bugs as Assassin’s Creed Unity right after its release, but I’d tried my best to beat Scratch.

All the sprites were done using pixilart and the sounds were taken from sketchylogic at opengameart. You can find these files at cs50-2020-pset0/.

School project

For school, my idea was creating a mini games cental in which the user could select any game he wanted to play and the game would appear right in front of him.

So, me and my group got simple versions of classical games (like pong) available at scratch website, then I did a simple website using nodejs+react and embedded these games on it.

Also, just to be fancy, I added a Wikipedia excerpt about each game, so after, selecting the game, some details appear explaining its history.

How to Run?

First of all you need to clone this repo to your computer:

git clone https://github.com/Dpbm/scratch-old-games

Then:

For Scratch

1. go to (scratch.mit.edu)[https://scratch.mit.edu/]
2. click on create

1. click on file

1. click on Load from your computer

1. Select the .sb3 file to play

For Games Central

To run Games Central website, you’ll first need to install nodejs then:

# run backend
cd games_central/backend-end
npm i
npm run dev

after executing the backend, run:

# run frontend
cd games_central/front-end
npm i --legacy-peer-deps
npm run start

Now the backend is running at http://localhost:3333 and frontend at http://localhost:3000.