TLDR: cool projects I made without tilemaps or sprites!
Hey coders! Recently the idea of Makecode without sprites has led me down an interesting path of small projects, centered around the constraint of writing directly to the screen (background image), without using the built in sprites and tilemap functionality. I think this is really interesting and I just wanted to share some projects that I’ve made with this in mind. If you have your own cool project with this idea in mind, or if this inspires you to make one, please share it!
Maze Generator
Maze generation has always been interesting to me! I made this topic about it a few weeks ago:
Minesweeper!
I made a version of Minesweeper a long time ago, but I decided to make a simple version without the limitations of a tilemap, which allowed me to make 5x5 tiles! Here is that project.
Screen Tiler?!?
Ok, so, this is a really cool project that I’m still working on. I took this idea from The Coding Train’s video on Wave Function Collapse. Basically, given a set of tile images and a list of rules about how they can connect, this program will tile the screen with them. If people are interested, I’ll make a longer post about how to make your own tiles and define your own rules, but the short version is that each side of every tile gets three letters or numbers, ordered around the tile clockwise, so every tile gets 12 characters, and the program matches one tile to another with these rules. The program will make all rotations of these tiles and rules, so there is no need to make rotated tiles. At the moment, if the program reaches a spot where it can’t place a tile, it just restarts and tries again, but I’m working on it. If you open the project in the editor, there are a bunch of disconnected tiles and rule sets. The pairs should be overlapping, but I don’t know what will happen if it’s opened from a shared link. This is really cool, at least to me, so I’ll try to answer any questions you guys have!
It seems like a lot of people have, like me, been inspired by the challenges sprite-less coding entails. I have seen so many cool projects and I really hope this continues!!! 