Complete with music!

For our second game design, and programming project in Scratch our class was instructed by the professor to build a level from an NES game. Being a Sega kid I was only familiar with the popular titles that my friends had so I decided to pick something a little different. I choose a game that was on the old mac I had growing up called Boulderdash, and since it had an NES counterpart (and goes back to the commodore 64) it was a perfect fit for the project. After finding a suitable set of sprites from a high-res screenshot of the game I proceeded to manually lay out each 32×32 tile block of the level. I played around with a few procedural methods for generating the map but for the sake of time decided that it would be easier to layout the level myself.

After I completed the layout I started programming in the basic game mechanics. Things like making sure the miner collided with the walls, collecting gems, getting the boulders to fall on you. I also set up a few global mechanics like a timer, score system and lives.

This project was more enjoyable for me than the first one, but I think that’s mainly because I was more comfortable in the scratch environment and was able to get what I wanted out of the program more easily.

Here is a dropbox link to the game if you are interested in trying it out, it requires the Scratch application which you can download here to play.