This is exactly what I use MakeCode for, to not atrophy my code skills. I can feel, every-single-day in my day job how my brain is rotting away every time I just say “eh I’ll ask AI to do it”.
BUT I’d have to say that AI has helped me greatly in learning the inner open-source projects that are pxt and pxt-arcade. With what it shown me I would never even think to dig into that codebase to see how all this works (and I still don’t know how it works …really… but I’m just dangerous enough to expand upon it).
After reading this thread, I didn’t see any mentions of the MakeCode Arcade VS Code Extension, just wanted to put that out there that it exists! (I haven’t personally used it yet, but it looks well done, then again, I prefer Webstorm…which is now free! So maybe an extension for Webstorm would be cool as well…but that’s a different tangent…)
Yeah…although I have been quite busy with my studies these past several years I realize that I essentially abandoned that website due to the fact I’d always tell myself that eventually I’d revamp the site, as I did have plans and notes, so that’s why I’ve been “procrastinating” on updating the website, as I keep telling myself one day I’ll make a new version of the website. Google Analytics also suggests that there is still some traffic to the site, so losing all that SEO with a new website (I definitely don’t plan on deploying on Vercel if I were to redo Awesome Arcade) is unfortunate…although who knows how much of those are just ChatGPT and Gemini crawling the web to answer user queries…
I planned that you could sign up with a GitHub account, suggest extensions and tools to be added, and you could post to a dedicated games section with ratings…kind of like Steam but for MakeCode Arcade. Unfortunately, moderating content (even if I were to not implement comments on games, and force people to link to the MakeCode Forums if they wanted to comment) is I believe one of the most difficult parts of building an online website, and finding the time to review all public facing changes (e.g. someone edits the description of their game, or they change an image, or they suggest an edit to an extension’s description) to the website is hard. Additionally, hosting this website would also involve either 1. more time and maintenance to self-host on my part, or 2. money lol (both of which are quite scarce as a university student lol)
Yes, although there are tools that have been developed to create executables of games such as MakeCode-Arcade-to-App (self promotion I guess) they are obviously not official and essentially just a bunch of scripts to cobble things together, which isn’t ideal. An official MakeCode-Arcade-backed solution, although would be very cool, would require a lot of work from the developers for a feature not many people use (especially supporting different OSes and configurations and even code signing and similar; and I’m not even considering the Google Play and Apple App stores). But last I checked, Scratch doesn’t have an official executable feature either…
