I’ve really enjoyed using MakeCode Arcade. Coming mainly from Scratch I found the transition quite intuitive.
One issue I found was with the animation player. It’s great for quickly setting animations on static objects like coins but I couldn’t work out how to use it in conjunction with flipping the image horizontally. I handled it like I do on Scratch by using a variable that counts up and changes frames.
Another thing I noticed was that as the block editor began to fill up the responsiveness of the program really went down. Moving blocks was quite slow and even scrolling was sluggish.
There’s still things I would like to add to my game. One thing I would really like to add are moving platforms but I’m unsure about how to make this work since to my understanding the tilemap is static and set at the start. I thought about making the platforms as sprites but was unsure about how to handle the collision with the player. If I coded it as you would in Scratch with the player’s y position being set to the top of the block it could work but it would be a waste of the tilemap which I really thought was an elegant tool.
Yes, the animations don’t work too well with flip image yet. This needs to be rethought a little.
Also agree that the block workspace slows down a lot. We have a couple things coming that should help.
As for moving platforms, @richard has been working on a game that does just that and also uses slopes but we’re unsure how to make it accessible for blocks.
Keep up the good work, it’s really appreciated. It’s great to see how active the development is from watching the livestreams and checking the forums. Thanks for your brilliant Youtube guide too. It really helped me out.
Reminds me of donkey kong country . The thing Daryl mentioned is here:
TBH I don’t have any plans to revive it right now, but it was a fun experiment to write!
The main issue is that for slopes you need to define the “geometry” of a tile in addition to the image, and it ends up being pretty complicated to make tilemaps. I might look into doing just the moving platform part in the non-slopes physics engine later.
It’s really impressive what you did there @richard I know very little about JavaScript so I wasn’t able to see how it all works.
In Arcade, are collisions all handled through the overlap block? Could there be a way to make a sprite act like a wall from the tilemap? For instance, a block that switches collision on or off for a given sprite?
