The making of Wizard Alien's Sick Tricks

I made this game for my Game-a-Week class. The theme for the week I made this was "One-Button Games".

I started by getting Scratch to tell me how long I held the button down for. To visualize it, I had the default sprite change colors. It kinda looked like it was charging up power, so I made that the focus of the game!

The next thing I decided was what to do with that power. It didn't take long until I came to the conclusion to have the player bounce off the edges of the screen.

But every game needs a goal, right? It took a bit to figure out what I wanted it to be, but I decided to spawn collectibles from the sky. I made two types of objects; Score-boosting ones and life-draining ones. Weaving between them would be the challenge of the game. At first, I had them spawn slowly. I wasn't sure how easy the movement would be to control, so I didn't want to make it impossible right away.

But as I was testing, I noticed you could lightly tap the button to stop on a dime, no matter how fast you were going. I thought about patching it, but I realized it added a certain depth to the mechanic and would allow me to increase the speed at which collectibles spawned.

The wizard theming was decided pretty early on. I had recently watched the anime Witchy Precure, which had the protagonists ride witch's brooms like skateboards occasionally. I thought it looked cool, so I decided that's how the wizard would ride his broom too. He didn't become an alien until I was messing around in Scratch's editor and accidentally made his skin a funny color. I gave him sunglasses to try and add a more "sporty" element to an objectively nerdy concept. I know the sprite is... programmer art... but I did put some thought into it, I swear!

As a last-minute addition, I added a high score using Scratch's cloud variables. I'm not super popular on Scratch anymore, but I still thought it would be neat if someone beat my high score eventually. I'd like to think it adds some replayability. At the time of writing, it's still at 27 from when I made the game, though.