Pokemon Rescue - MakeCode Arcade

This is the 3rd in a series of the Pokemon Rescue game, this time I decided to use MakeCode Arcade to build it. Given the struggles I had with GBStudio and GDevelop I thought I could give this platform a try, the biggest draws were the fact that I could write using TypeScript and it's actually something that could be played on a handheld device!

Goals

1. Have the game be simple, my young daughter is the target audience
2. Have it be portable, she'd like to be able to play it while on the move
3. Have something to do with animals, she loves animals
4. Challenge me in terms of code level and graphics (also learn MakeCode Arcade)

Overall Game Challenges

After some thought I decided to make the game a sort of "rescue" where instead of accepting dogs and cats you'd accept Pokemon characters. Bonus with these if you feed and keep them happy they could have the opportunity to grow (sorry I don't know the terms for the later level Pokemon).

Feeding the Pokemon is relatively simple but posed some solid programming challenges, mostly around "where is the Pokemon" and "are there other Pokemon in this same zone".

I ended up creating 3 "zones" where the Pokemon could feed and had to check all the other Pokemon to see if they are also within that zone. If there were more than just one in a specific zone then they wouldn't eat.

On the counter of the food, there's also a happiness level. This happiness level is decreased slowly while the Pokemon are not in the play area. This includes the food area, so they will slowly become less happy even while they eat. The game is to constantly move the Pokemon from the food to the play area to try and keep them fed and happy.

Other fun items added to the game include a computer (always wanted to make a computer interface inside of a computer interface) where I had to hand build a UI for the computer. It was surprisingly difficult to get the cursor to look and work naturally along with showing the data of all the Pokemon.

Fast vs Slow "tick"

Some of the overall game techniques I ended up discovering are things I'll likely use for future games. One of those is the aspect of a "fast" and "slow" tick.

Basically my goal was to reduce "forever" running blocks to update stats, move creatures and other time based things. I could have created a forever block in each creature or every other component, but to me that felt like it would slow the game down. So I created a global tick block:

main.ts

I have a "slow" and "fast" which are the same except they have different pause levels but do the same sort of calls to the Critters and Events.  The Critters and Events loop over their own inventory of things (Critters for example keeps track of a list of critters in the game and propagates that event for each).

This of course does cause the slight angle of things either updating at the same time but I added some random "should I move" or "should I eat" per creature/element so the overall look is quite random and feels natural.

Coding Experience

The development environment for MakeCode Arcade is absolutely great. Their editor is completely online and I've actually been able to use it to teach a video game class!

The best part of their experience is the fact that you can move somewhat freely between block coding (which the kids love) and Typescript. This allows anyone to see some direct "how this looks" when you transition between the two. For me where I wouldn't touch block coding with a 10' pole, it actually was quite useful to learn what capabilities I could use within the framework.

I would use this transition between blocks and code quite a bit to learn how to build what I was going for. Eventually I was confident enough to know what global component to use for what. They have great typeahead as well and checking, but using the blocks to learn that `scene` is a global variable is great experience. I wonder if other frameworks could do something like this.

Conclusion

I realize that a lot of this isn't new to any vet game developer. This post (and this entire blog) is mostly for me to look back at some of the things I've built and the enjoyment I had building it.

The game is not actually complete at this point. There was quite a bit more I wanted to do such as actual adoptions baed on how happy the Pokemon were and their "level". But I found after playing it for awhile that the game actually wasn't much fun! I'm sure there's way to make everyday chores exciting, maybe there's something I could add to make this more exciting but I ran out of motivation.

Feel free to play the game however, it's a nice experience and may inspire the next amazing game!