![]() I'll jump and that's the end of the game. And then I'll show you what happens when I do go too far. So I'll jump and jump and then I'll make sure I don't go too far. If I drop into the pool of lava, the game will be over. The red area over on the right is a pool of lava. I'll press the spacebar and move forward. Now, I'm ready to exercise that jump control. And when I grab it, I hear a little sound from my computer. I see that there's a gem over on the left side, so I'll go grab it. Then I'll make it go left, and it drops down again. When it gets past the floor, it drops down to the next level. Starting from the beginning of the game, I'll press the right arrow key on my keyboard, and the character moves to the right. I'll do that by clicking the Preview button at the top, and I see the game rendered in iPhone dimensions. So let's see what happens when you actually play the game. The jumping control says that when the actor receives an event of a keystroke, which is of spacebar on the keyboard, then it first asks the question, is the character grounded? And if it's true then it does one behavior. And let's take a look in detail at the jumping control. ![]() What happens when the Player's moving right. What happens when the character is moving left, how the animations are managed. There's definitions for how collisions work, for how character controls work. It's where you define the behavior of all instances of the Player. This is called the Player Prototype screen. And here is where all of the behaviors are managed. So I'll go back to this top panel, the Inspector, and I'm going to double click on the Player, that's one of the actors. But you can always build your own games with your own graphics. So you can get started quickly building your own games. They give you the software for free, but then there's a big marketplace where you can buy assets and templates. And this gives you a little clue to the GameSalad business model. For both images and sounds, you'll see tabs here labeled Project and Purchased. And this is where you can create animations. They can accelerate, they can move, they can collide, they can destroy. In the lower left, there's a set of behaviors. I see the background, I see the Player right here, and all the other items that will show up on the screen. In level 1, I see a listing of all the actors that will be used. To get to the details of the game, I'll go back to the scenes and specifically to level 1. And then, there are other actors such as springs, torches, and gems, which also affect the behavior of the game. You'll see that is the little thing that runs around the environment. In this template, there's an actor called the Player. They have their own internal logic, and they have rules that they have to follow. Actors in GameSalad are like sprites in Scratch. And a description, instructions, and search tags. By default, this game is built for an iPhone in landscape orientation. The Project info is where you set the game title, the dimensions of the environment. I'll open the template, and expand to full screen, and show you that there are four tabs across the top. And there are consequences for getting the moves wrong. It can't go through floors or ceilings or through walls, but it can run and jump to get around everything. That is, a sprite, or an actor, as it's known in GameSalad, runs around an environment and is subject the rules of that environment. This is a template for a running and jumping game, and it uses environmental physics. And to show you a little bit about GameSalad, I'll focus on these templates. On Mac, it's possible to start a new project by using one of the existing templates. On Windows, you'll have more of a conventional menu-based interface. On Mac, when you first start up the application, it looks like this. You'll need to provide your email address and register, but then you can download the software for either Mac or Windows. The software you use to build games with GameSalad is completely free. Before that age, the interface is probably a little bit too complex. ![]() I do recommend this for older kids, starting at about age 13. But because it's primarily a graphical programming environment that requires little to no code, kids can learn it pretty easily. GameSalad isn't just for kids, it's used actually by real software developers to build game apps that are published on a lot of platforms. And now I'm going to describe another graphical programming tool named GameSalad that kids can use to build their own games. In this chapter, I've described graphical programming tools for building animations with Scratch, and Android mobile apps with MIT App Inventor.
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