[HN Gopher] City simulator I made in Scratch
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City simulator I made in Scratch
Author : Annulus
Score : 153 points
Date : 2025-03-13 14:46 UTC (3 days ago)
(HTM) web link (scratch.mit.edu)
(TXT) w3m dump (scratch.mit.edu)
| eliben wrote:
| This is very impressive, amazing work!
|
| One question: how do you manage large code bases in scratch? Is
| it easy to find a piece of code? Something like grepping for
| specific things seems difficult.
|
| I've recently been really warming up to Scratch since one of my
| kids picked it up and really enjoys it. I love the built-in
| concurrency model - it's a bit like CSP. Gets kids to think
| concurrently from day 1.
| Rendello wrote:
| Scratch is not conducive to complex (traditional) projects,
| which I think is sort of the appeal for seasoned programmers.
| For my part, I woke up one weekend knowing I had to make a
| recursive bisection demo in it [1]. The effort I knew it would
| take vs the banality and lack of game play was really funny to
| me in an absurd way.
|
| Scratch lacks functions with return values, but if you hack
| global variables to be like registers, you can emulate them and
| even do recursion. At least that's how I did it. The Cartesian
| plane has (0,0) in the centre, which is annoying if you're used
| to traditional graphics.
|
| I have a young cousin who's intimidated by making the jump from
| Scratch into traditional game dev. I tell him that Scratch
| simplifies a lot of things, but it also makes a lot of things
| harder if you're used to regular programming.
|
| "Recursive Bisection on a Cartesian Plane in the Horizontal and
| Vertical Axes." (hold shift when you press "go" for fast mode):
| https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/1098438053
| jgwil2 wrote:
| That's really clever, bravo.
| ashater wrote:
| My younger daughter, who is pretty good at making games in
| Scratch is not that interested in jumping into text/code
| based programming. I do think Scratch makes things a lot
| easier and text based programming is not thar appealing to
| kids. I will try to start her with Pygame but even that might
| make it seem very arcane and not very visual.
| hdjrudni wrote:
| Maybe try something with instant feedback?
|
| I'm not sure what precisely, but I'm picturing a split view
| with text on the left and the output on the right.
|
| I do this in web dev, React + hot reload is wonderful. For
| games, I've done it with instantly recompiling shaders but
| not much else.
| Rendello wrote:
| PICO-8 [1] might be a good choice. I always consider that
| kids want their friends to try their games, and so being
| able to easily distribute to the web is awesome. They can
| link their game from the site [2], or with some parental
| help they could even serve them from their own website,
| which could be very empowering for a kid.
|
| 1. https://www.lexaloffle.com/pico-8.php
|
| 2. https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?cat=7&carts_tab=1&#sub=2
| &mod...
| Annulus wrote:
| It is really hard to search when there's a lot of code - I just
| had to be pretty careful with how I laid out everything, so I
| roughly knew where everything was
| fatant wrote:
| I think for me it was something that came with practice and
| intentionally organizing my code in a way that made spatial
| sense to me.
| LukeDunsMoto wrote:
| Oh man I love a city builder - this is very cool thanks for
| sharing
| timojaask wrote:
| This looks very much like Polytopia
|
| https://polytopia.io/
| chrisan wrote:
| on firefox at least, the WASD controls seems inverted?
| mixdup wrote:
| Safari as well, and I couldn't get any other keys to work
| besides WASD
| SamBam wrote:
| You have to click a square of land first, and then space will
| add a building (or whatever you cycle to with the arrows).
|
| (Edit: at least in fantasy mode. I haven't yet worked out
| what to do in reality mode.)
| turnsout wrote:
| On Dvorak, WASD never works; game designers should use arrow
| keys or find a lower-level way to access key events that
| doesn't depend on the software layout.
| Aloisius wrote:
| Usually game developers use keyboard scancodes which are
| layout agnostic rather than the character generated when
| pressing a key, so it works on dvorak, AZERTY, etc.
|
| I don't know if Scratch supports them though. Seems like it
| would given it's game focus.
| turnsout wrote:
| Whatever the reason, in this case, it's broken
| araes wrote:
| Had a similar comment on starting reality mode.
|
| One issue that arrive after a few minutes that's related, is
| the map arrows to be able to scroll around would often vanish.
| Going to the zoomed out overview map would eventually have the
| navigation return, yet kept occasionally happening for some
| reason.
|
| Fun game, although world got flooded pretty much instantly, so
| was a bit of a downer. Still not sure if trade routes actually
| do anything other than explore the map. Did not ever seem to
| actually connect to nearby structures.
|
| Be nice if there was some way to zoom out one level at least.
| Really... wanted to be able to zoom out after having 5-10
| structures.
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