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Closet |
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This closet contains a collection of every personally meaningful thing I've done in the field of computer science. It's my place, so it's laid out the way I like it, but maybe you can enjoy it too and get some inspiration looking around. Start from the shelves right in front of you, and be careful not to get lost in the mess.
From what I remember, I've always used the computer: I started at (around) 6 years old by playing video games at my dad's PC. At that time, the games that I played and enjoyed the most are probably Harry Potter's games (in particular, the first one, Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone), A Bug's Life and Midtown Madness 2. I could literally spend hours playing without making any progress at all towards the end of the game, mainly because I didn't understand how to do that, but also because, probably, I just enjoyed the gameplay and felt no urge to proceed in the story.
Apart from gaming and drawing with Paint, I had no skills with the computer. I can remember myself trying to delete a folder for hours (maybe days) on Windows XP: I strongly believed that "Backspace" was the right key to do that, so I used to try over and over again to press that key, just to get bumped to the upper level folder all the time. What I was really good at was creating folders labyrinths, which are, at least according to my vocabulary, a folder which contains subfolders, which in turn contain subsubfolders, with only one path that lead to a certain secret file.
I was having fun with the computer, but I wasn't creating anything mine (allright, except for those fabulous folders labyrinths).
Everything changed in 2009. After watching a Scooby-Doo film, Scooby-Doo and the Cyber Phase, in which the protagonists enter a video game, I suddenly felt the desire to create a video game myself. I immediately let my father know, so he could help me out.
My father had been into computers for a good part of his life. In the past, he had learnt Visual Basic, so it was the first thing that came to his mind. I don't remember for sure, but he probably set the environment up for me, and gave me some advice: of course, he couldn't help me that much with Visual Basic, since he studied it a long time before. So I was left to play with it... and that didn't turned out well: I didn't know what to do, I was just able to place components inside and a window form, but no way I knew how to add some functionalities.
Luckily, in the meanwhile my father discovered something that could be suited for me: Scratch. Scratch is a visual programming language primarly used to teach programming by creating games. Well, it was exactly what I needed!
With the help of my dad I started making my way around the Scratch interface and learning programming concepts, such as "if" and "while". In little time I had created my first game. Apart from its ease of use, what I really liked about Scratch was that you could share your games in their website and get comments and likes from other users.
On the 5th of July 2009 I published my first game: Beware_the_Ghost(the underscores in the name are a proof that my dad helped me during the developing the game, or at least during the publishing phase). I consider the 5th of July 2009 as the official date in which I entered the world of programming.
The Scratch account under which I published games was (and is) called riggraz: this is another influence of my father, which calls himself margraz on the Web. Under that nickname I published some games (and some animations), from which I would like to recall:
- Beware_the_Ghost: the aforementioned game, my first one
- Pong: well, why not
- Cat vs Lion: my first (and nearly last) animation, with an embarassing dubbing made by me (in italian, which is my mother tongue)
- Dot Dodge: I remixed (yeah, in Scratch you can do things like that) an already existing game and added a new mode. I really disliked the fact that I had to cite and give credits to who created the original game, so I didn't do that. Ever. In my profile, there are other examples of games or animations in (e.g. Paint, Animated Fire, BubbleWrap) that I clearly copied without crediting. Good job, young riggraz (I'm kidding, I forgive you).
- How to open a tricky treasure chest: definitely the best animation I created in my entire life
- EXTREME FLAME: in my opinion the first game that shows that I had acquired some skills
Then, they day after the release of EXTREME FLAME, I decided to create a new Scratch account, probably because I felt I needed a fresh start. I called it ZackDRAGONX (the "Zack" part is a reference to Final Fantasy character Zack Fair).
While I had released a lot of garbage on the Scratch website under the "riggraz" nickname, I probably decided it was time to publish only more deserving games with the "ZackDRAGONX" account. Moreover I had acquired the necessary skills to make some decent games.
In the period between december 2009 and may 2010 I published 6 games:
- (December 2009) Blow it up: in this game the player has to blow into the microphone of the computer in order to make a balloon explode. Of course, you don't have to actually blow but just to make the more noise possible in the microphone. Anyway, I think it was a cool concept.
- (January 2010) Balloon Shooter: I must have been in love with balloons at that time. Actually, this game was inspired by an old game I used to play on my mother phone.
- (April 2010) Ball World: a cool game about a ball.
- (April 2010) One Script, One Sprite: The Ball: another cool game about a ball. It was actually made for a sort of challenge in the Scratch community: realize a game using only 1 sprite and 1 script. My most successful Scratch game.
- (April 2010) Run Joey Run!: I literally copied this game from another website. Here is the original game.
- (May 2010) IceCube's Quest: probably the game I spent more time developing. I was pretty happy with the result, even though it didn't get a lot of views and likes.
This period was thrilling: creating games, releasing them on scratch.mit.edu and receiving likes and comments was exciting. I remember I was always trying to get the most likes as possible in order to reach the front page of the website, where the most played & loved games were featured.