Scratch

I am now 39, married with 2 kids, switching from a Teaching degree to a Fine Arts degree and loving Scratch. But I started out....

I grew up in bars (just because they are moms doesn't mean they are all genetically predisposed to be good at it heh) playing Pinball and Shuffleboard with college kids. I was good, but still so young that I used a stool and the only way I could reach a flipper was to lean to one side of the machine, then lean the other way to hit the other flipper button. Also where I learned my first "hack" (I think.) People would put their quarters on the glass to let others know that they also had the "next game." But the glass was held down by strips of metal banding. On some machines, there would be a tiny gap you couldn't see between the metal and the glass. So the first few "save game" quarters would slide into the gap, trapped. If I was out of money, I would get a straw and go around digging them out for a few free games. Oh yeah, all games cost .25 cents back then.

Then the table-Pong games showed up in the bars (I was in Tuscaloosa Alabama I believe) and although I was fascinated, I didn't get to play much. Till then, the games were usually in a back room at bars and most patrons seemed to take this table-pong as an intrusion into their "bar" world.

Then my next experience was my cousin's home Pong game. He was older, I always lost and only seldom played. It was like a Playstation or something except that it only had like a few versions of Pong built in. There were no more games via cartridges or anything.

I got an Atari 2600 which was lucky for me because my parents were divorced and we were poor. When we would go to the supermarket, I would beg my mom for a comic book. Instead, she would give me a quarter and say "If you save that, eventually you will have enough to buy a comic book." With an income that slow, every dime became precious! I saved until I had a bag full of silver dollars, quarters, whatever. I dug them out of couch cushions and places best not remembered!
Anyway, I think the Atari 2600 cost like $127 and came with Space Invaders and maybe some racing game with cars, planes, and stuff. At around $30 a game, I only wound up getting a few more. You had to guess which game to buy by which package looked coolest unless you were lucky enough to know someone with that game already. Not a particularly winning formula at the time. Nothing like going over to a buddies house with games lying everywhere lol. My cousin had a racing game with paddles that would spin infinitely and we would stay up all night playing. There was an ice race track (A square that you drove around in a circle) and I discovered instead of slowing for turns, you could keep the gas floored and with much practice, use one finger to spin the paddle around and around and make your car do doughnuts perfectly all the way through the both corner turns. Drove my cousin insane because he was older but I was better. That was where I learned to be best, but not to dominate, unless you just wanted to play by yourself a lot hahaha.

And then came my next game hacking moment. I read about some hacks in some Atari magazines.. in Adventure you could do something weird, forget, but the cool one to me was for Space Invaders. I hated the arcade version cause it was hard and my money went fast. Even the sounds were ominously annoying, like an electronic version of "pathetic human, go home broke now mwuhahaha!" But on the Atari, we read you could hold down a switch when turning on the game and your usually oh-so-annoying single fire bullet that could not be re-fired till it hit something became rapid auto-fire! My mother and I had stayed up literally all night long some nights fighting that game and now, we were doing the same thing except we were mowing our way through impossibly fast levels, it was such a rush!

I walked into the inaugural Gifted and Talented class when I was in 6th grade (1983.) Myself and the other handful of "bright hopefuls" were the guinea pigs for a program that lives on here in the same school 27 years later. Anyway, they made us write short papers on what kind of projects we wanted to do. Novel idea but silly in hindsight but hey, they had funding and a shot of a life-time (small backwards southern town btw) so they just floored it and went with it.
So I was going to ad-lib some crazy book and my friend was going to short-hand it while I free-rapped the plot and then we would edit it together. But when I made it in the door, the first thing I saw was a row of IBM TRS80 Model IIIs (still have an owners manual lol!?!?) and privately went "whoa." In no time, I was sneaking off to see what those guys were up to. It was crazy hard to me, all DOS and BASIC (not VBasic btw) but where I really started learning was by typing in programs that someone found in some magazine. One was a game where you were a "V" in the middle of the screen. Random lines of text with a few spaces were printed above you, then they scrolled down. You had to go left and right to either go through the spaces, or go through letters that wouldn't kill you. We freaked, loved it. The screen was still in the same, text DOS mode but stuff was moving and we had a slight hand in it. I planned my first epic huge rpg game (I was a big Dungeons and Dragon fan) and made it as far as creating a splash screen with a big sword on it. Haha! Hey, it was hard! You had to first draw it out on paper and then translate it into weird data, and the pixels were not little squares but little rectangles.. yeee-haw fun!

Then came the console revolution. The Atari had spawned it. My step-brother had a Colecovision (cough lame cough, hey, the best game I ever played on it was about Smurfs?!?) My grandparents got an Intellivision- amazing system, well thought out games with much more re-playability than others, in hind-sight. But I guess it suffered from bad marketing cause even then people would be like "An Intelli-what?" (ps, know how the years later the Playstation zoomed up there with Nintendo? By selling games on cheap-to produce cds instead of expensive to make cartridges, and selling games cheaper.)

Oh yeah, by now the Game Arcade had also blown up huge!! Arcades for electronic games were first small, out-of-the-way dives run by weird old guys who looked like they were sizing you up for a picture on the back of a milk carton. American games were sooooooo lame. Blocky, weird themes, who knows where they came up with their ideas. Oddly drawn cowboys shooting pong blocks at eachother while an ugly stagecoach scrolled repeatedly up the screen. Cash in some hundreds for quarters Ma, now we're really living! Then they started importing Asian games and bam, a new world opened up. Without getting to specific, they did a much better job of giving you 15 or 20 minutes of gaming bliss for your precious quarters.
Two standout games were Karate Champ, great game play, humor, and for me the first time two people could play at the same time against each other. My next moment of "seeing the light" came from watching some old (lol 20yrs?) dude destroy all the local hotshots and then proceed to beat the game. While everyone else went away mystified, I stuck around like the kid in some Kung-Fu flick. "Mister, Mister! How did you beat all those guys? I didn't even know you COULD beat the machine?!?" He just ruffled my hair, smiled and said "Defense kid." And to this day, a staple of every VS fighting game is that defense is faster than offense so if you can block them you can usually hit them next. (and so I went on to win countless battles in you honor, oh nameless faceless sensai of my past)
The other standout game was Dragonslair. It used stored cartoon animation, just like in a cartoon movie at the theater which was just insane to watch. They could have made a killing just by putting it in a small room with peepholes, then charging kids a dollar a whack to watch some pro play it. But what was more amazing, and scary, it was the first game that cost more than a quarter. Fifty cents to be exact. Many years later I would see my first Coke-a-Cola banner on a website (it used to all be free and non-commercial, really!!!) and think the same thing... "Oh no!"

And back on the home-front, da dada daaaa.... Nintendo. I didn't get one but shortly afterwards came SuperNintendo and I finally scored. You didn't even know where your Atari went, what was it anyway, a 2600, 2400? Who cared? My family was better off financially but I still didn't manage to beg off too many game cartridges.

My next jump in the pc world was getting a home pc, the Commodore 64. I didn't have a floppy drive (big 5" floppies btw) but I had a tape cassette drive that was oppressively slow and faulty. Nothing like waiting an hour and a half for a game to load, but it doesn't load right so you try again. And then the game sucked hahahaha.

BUT!!! now I had a pc in my bedroom, 2 nearly indecipherable user manuals and all the time I needed. And a light pen?!?! I drew Bill the Cat. Ack! I wish I could tell you that I went on to become some genius code monkey. Quake? Yeah, I coded that at lunch one day. Not. Weird little C64 groups were springing up all over the country. In my town, it was populated mainly by old dudes and rich kids. I went once and scored some stupid games and weird files I never understood.
Man, I spent no telling how many nights trying to write games by myself. I could finally get some little spaceship to move right, or some pixelated, mono color dude to punch the air, but that was it.
Once again, we started getting magazines with articles but more importantly to me, code. Know why it was called a Commodore64? Because you has 64k of RAM to work with. Period. No more. So we would type in these games in Basic and it would blow us away how someone could put all their game into a tiny space that we filled up without getting hardly anything to work. Then they started putting out games in binary or assembly code instead of Basic. See, Basic is just a higher level language form of binary. The whole point is no one can read and write binary well enough to code in it except like magic fairy game coders. And it is hard, even for them. Really. So Basic was made with words that represented subroutines (like how Scratch works, or any language higher than assembly lol. Gee, how "high" a language do you reckon Scratch is anyway?) but you didn't know that. You just knew that the first time you did the Hello World program and made your name fill up the screen you felt like a programing god, heh.

My stepbrother and I would spend hours, one of us reading the binary code, "0, 1, 1, 0, 1, 0, 0..." while the other carefully typed each number in. It was more brutal than it sounds. What was really bad was when you made a mistake and it wouldn't run when you finished. The only logical thing we could think of to do was split it and reprogram half. If that fixed it, you were lucky. If not, then you would do half of the other half, rinse repeat until you finally lucked into over-writing the bad data. Then someone (whom I would have named my first unborn child after had I known who) figured out how to put a check-sum in. It wasn't perfect but it basically worked by adding a number after so many code numbers. That extra number was actually the sum of the previous digits, hence the name. The theory was that if you entered one of the real code digits wrong, they wouldn't add up to the check-sum so the program would stop your data entry and you could fix it right then. Not perfect, but so close that we didn't care.

But hey, we were innovative. We were once so desperate to play a computer game that one night we found a box full of that (now) old white and green printer paper that is joined end-to-end to feed into a ?dot-matrix? printer. I figured out how to alter it so that it would feed into a typewriter. I made my step-brother sit dumbfounded (unusual since he was smarter than me I might add) while I sketched out a winding "road" that ran up, down, and all over the connected sheets. After folding them back into the box, I loaded one end into the typewriter (manual, non-electric.) As my step-brother either typed (moved right) or backspaced (move left) I manually rolled the thingy to make the hand-drawn race course "scroll" by. Ever gotten a paper cut by Scrollx before? (Yeah, yeah, I know it was only Y scrolling, GET UP OFF ME I"M OLD!) 

I went into the Navy at 17 as an Aviation Electronic Technician. I was sick of school but accidentally did great on the entrance exam. They said the only harder job was nuclear submarine where you had to learn nuclear physics?!? All I know is the guys that dropped out of that and came "down" to our level made us look normal.
During my training, I crashed-course everything from soldering, calculus, trig, how electricity works, and eventually into what electronic components were (the little thingies you see inside a pc or anywhere on a circuit board.) Ever seen an electrical schematic diagram? They used to stick them in or on all electronic equipment just about. Google one and see how much fun they look like ><!! I had to learn to look at one and trace single electron flow through the sucker. And I was like 18 and had a military ID card that got me into any bar.. etc. Nothing like weaving back to your base and barracks at 3:00 AM, just in time for 3:30 march formation for school. Ugh. Hey, I was still a kid. But I wound up drinking 8 Big Gulp sized cups of coffee and standing up in the back of class every day cause if you fell asleep, Uncle Sam wasn't to happy.
I forgot most of the fine details but now I can fix most electronics (and things) pretty easily. But even if we are best friends, if you call me over to fix your air conditioner or install your in-dash, flip-out, touchscreen  whootiewho... the wife's gonna make you cough up some cash. Too many freebies in the past 

But one of the really cool things I learned in the Navy was how a computer physically thinks. But I didn't spend any time playing or working on pcs till I got out. Then I went through many years with limited interaction. Then came (for me) the internet on college pcs. With the original Quake, I was hooked on pc gaming, particularly online "deathmatches."

Since then I...
learned computer graphics through Paint in Windows 3.1 through Paintshop Pro, then Photoshop. I have also had a lot of time with Poser (figure animation), 3dsMax (3d cad), gif animators,fractal generators, you name it. I've done graphic mods for NeverWinter Nights, put my own gun in a Ghost Recon mod, spent years playing an early online game called DragonSpires, went on to beta test a ton of games, got 10th best all-time bot at Bot Battle (you scripted your bots AI and it fought 4 other bots in a small arena. You could pick from all kinds of weapons and defense and had to manage ammo, health, and energy and grab random power-ups, last bot standing wins, uber cool but sadly gone) where I not only contributed animated gifs for users to pick from to represent their bots during battle but eventually got offered the programing spot right before it disappeared. Obviously I declined but only because it was in Python and I did not have time to learn it as well as coding the whole game for everyone while it was up and running 

By then, in really small and weird circles, I was gaining street cred if for nothing other than all my experiences. Like a permanent oldbie status, I could start some new game (with increasingly limited options of which game though cause I have ALWAYS been stuck on dial-up) and very soon get recognized by someone as Pain from DragonSpires or whatever and get slightly special treatment. But again, I'm the old-school gamer so people were always baffled when I was like "No thanks for the gold and rare items, it is more fun to earn them!" I mean, if you are really gonna play then getting twinked out right away only limits how long you are going to enjoy playing that game.

I wound up at a PlayerWorlds (awesome free rpg game system) game called Delrith Online cause some of my old DragonSpires friends had migrated there. I kinda played it low key a bit but then the call for mappers went out. I quietly applied and then began tiling up the most awesome maps you ever seen. One of my specialties was layering the same old well-used and tired traditional map tiles in carefully thought out ways so you'd just go "Hey, where did that boat/cracked castle wall/whatever come from? That's not even in our tiles?!?!"
Eventually someone identified me and I got made an admin, then eventually offered co-ownership by Dark Troika and Reindeer. Honestly, they did it because of what I did their, not my history. I had admins that worked like laser-wielding surgeons and treated every player wit respect. There was always that guy who knew some hack and wanted to disrupt the game for everyone else. Big hint if you ever end up in my position against "that guy," impress him, befriend him, and put him to work! You will save yourself and your gamers a lot of headache lol!
But once again I turned down the offer. I had spent most of my years at DragonSpires simply as a player. But DS stored the graphics in gif files so I got a good taste of doing isometric tile graphics as well as very simple walking animations for sprites. The PlayerWorlds system was/is free to anyone so I started tinkering with it on my own time. Funny, now my 7 yr old daughter soetimes works a=on a PW game that we only run at home cause mapping is fun! Oh yeah, the reason I turned down the offer was because I had watched DragonSpires fall apart from the top down, then get snuffed out like a candle. I have more huge essays out there in never-land about how this happens to so many sites, games and non-games as well as why it happens at a much slower pace in the real world to companies.
Anyway, I saw the writing on the wall and sure enough right after I said "No thanks," down it all came. Break out the teeny violin time lol.

By now I was married, having kids, and the broadband gaming world was disappearing over the horizon of my dial-up existence. Sniff. More violin please. So where did that leave me? With a crazy wild host of abilities.. no place to call my home.. no 'ride to work' so to speak cause of my uber slow internet connection, so I just drifted in and out of more simple, modem friendly games like UrbanDead and stuck with cd games.

There is far more that I have left out or just flat over-looked. Plus, I have left out the years I spent doing other pc things like learning to record and process audio (music) via Cakewalk, Fruityloops etc mainly at HomeRecording.com many years ago. Fir a brief bit, a buddy and I lan dominated basically the entire world at COD@ but only because we had like the fastest connection on the planet for some weird reason. Did your clan leader get embarrassed one night in front of everyone? Do you remember 2 dudes dropping in with shotguns (yeah, they had to nerf them, sorry) and wiping out your entire squad? Then that was there one, rare night when we played different sides and went through servers providing body armor for each other till we got kicked. Talk about funny, "Ok man, 2 of my teammates are coming up te stairs after you. Pow pow. Next please?) I had a song that was supposed to go on HomeRec's  very first compilation cd but I yanked it at what I thought at the time was the last minute. Perfectionist.

So how did I end up here? My wife is the Director of Operations at our local museum and they needed instructors for a summer class for kids. I had been working on my teaching degree and a friend knew that and got me up there. Then they found out about my um, extended capabilities (I call it insanity, whatever) and had me teaching all kinds of classes. One of them was a class on the Pico system. It is basically like combining Scratch with the Lego Wedo system. Hey, you think Scratch is fun? Me too! lol but you ought try transmitting your code via infra-red into a little brain that then interacts with light, sound, voltage sensors, etc while also being able to control a motor. And Legos have gears. Hmmm? Oh yeah baby, I had to build a (wired) remote control car with headlights, a horn, etc. They have a bunch of the kits. Recently it dawned on me that since the 'brains' can both transmit and receive light, you could theoretically combine them into a larger 'thinking' circuit that did something like, oh I dunno, made a decent size Lego robot walk around, feeling for obstacles or light changes and reacting accordingly. Maybe I'll sneak in one weekend and grab an empty  office and just do it... ha!

But while researching Pico (agreed to teach the class without having ever heard of it) I found Scratch. Hey man! I spent like part of a lifetime beating myself senseless trying to learn this stuff and here are all you people, !young people! going about it like it is second-hand nature. "Grab some Cheerios, feed the dog, fix the script in my scrolling platformer, and then see if Mom is really going to make me mow the stupid lawn. Yeah, I know that's not everybody but you get my point. I had to out-genius an entire school of kids to get my exposure whereas yo guys click download, wait a second, and then see if it looks worth your time!

Hey, I'm not knocking anyone! You have no idea how lucky you are to have it so good, but I'm sure my great grandparents would say the same to me. For them downloading meant forking the hay off the wagon. They wore flour sacks for clothes and whittled their toys out of broom handles. "Ma, Jessie's got a new stick and he won't lay me play with it none!" Or how about using (surprise) a stick to roll a wagon wheel rim to shool beside you. I may be pushing 40 years old but any game you play with a stick while WALKING TO SCHOOL has Epic Fail written all over it from top to bottom!

And their lies the conundrum my young friends    Some tell me that it is cool having lived through all this stuff, thanks! I suspect it is much cooler as a too-long funny story than back when I was rolling that type-writer thingy and thinking "Gee, I'm innovative as a mug but this is pretty sad really" hahaha.

So here I had given up on ever learning game programing. I've done a working online C+  multiplayer thingy (very basic) and assorted macros and whatnot but I never really knew the nuts and bolts about what makes a game work. But in my comparatively short time here at scratch, I have learned a TON of standard game routines from scrolling to collision detection etc etc. But more importantly to me, I get to hang out in All About Scratch and share this knowledge with everyone else! I dunno, I'm wired funny to start with. But I really believe that the way your brain works as you get older gives you a slight advantage, not really "smarter" but with more or better functioning Ram! I can juggle so many inter-related concepts in my head now that I find myself snapping back to reality at 4:30am only to realize that I am snapping code blocks together without even remembering where they came from, or what they are. And then they work?!? Definitely a sign for bedtime, heh.
Here is the most awesome thing of all to me lately. I have begun programing in my sleep. Really! And not just dreaming about programing but actually working on real problems I'm having while awake, trying out different solutions and seeing what works. Of course, I am only dreaming so sometimes I remember the strangest blocks and things happening on the stage, hahahaha. But amazingly, one our two of the ideas either make sense or make sense enough to work in some bizarrely semi-brilliant fashion. Who knows, I've kind of started getting to know Archmage in the forums.

Maybe he and I will become best friends. Together, we end up spearheading the next great  Scratch Mod which in 25 years become Wiz-Scratch version 206.3 only I died (cancer, why not?) and now he has finished coding his dream-state time-traveling application and is going back through time to now, trying to get me to write some code that will morph through time into a vital piece of whatever he needs to save humanity from (insert favorite apocalyptic theme here please) That's cool with me bro, but can you help me with me stupid RPG game tonight first?



Lastly, I am also crazy mad about playing music mainly on guitar, doing art with whatever medium you have around, my family, and all kinds of traditionally 'non-masculine' things.. only now I am 6'1" and 200 lbs and look more like a football player than the nerd that I really am. Never let anyone define what it takes for you to feel ok about just being yourself. Most people that doubt you secretly wish they could do whatever you are doing and the ones who try to sell you on something else are often doing it for their own benefit, not yours. That is not to say that the world or the people in it are messed up, but instead to remind you that boundaries are just imaginary walls. With some good old fashioned "want to," or maybe a really fast moving sprite, you can go right through them.  > = P
And you're never to old or young to learn something new. I tried out for my first play tonight as a matter of fact, we'll see if I make it!

Last edited by Locomule (2010-07-28 05:13:27)