Anna Anthropy - Make Your Own PuzzleScript Games!

ANNA ANTHROPY

San Francisco

MAKE YOUR OWN PUZZLESCRIPT GAMES! Copyright 2020 by Anna Anthropy

All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the copyright owner and the publisher.

ISBN-10: 1-59327-944-2
ISBN-13: 978-1-59327-944-8

Publisher: William Pollock
Production Editor: Laurel Chun
Cover Illustration: Josh Ellingson
Illustrator: Garry Booth
Developmental Editor: Annie Choi
Technical Reviewer: Stephen Lavelle
Copyeditor: Anne Marie Walker
Compositor: Happenstance Type-O-Rama
Proofreader: Emelie Burnette

For information on distribution, translations, or bulk sales, please contact No Starch Press, Inc. directly:
No Starch Press, Inc.
245 8th Street, San Francisco, CA 94103
phone: 1.415.863.9900;
www.nostarch.com

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Anthropy, Anna, author.
Title: Make your own PuzzleScript games! / Anna Anthropy.
Description: 1st ed. | San Francisco : No Starch Press, 2019. | Includes
index. | Summary: A beginner-friendly guide to creating interactive
games using PuzzleScript. Covers the entire game development process
including problem solving, level design, and how to design games to be
both challenging and fun-- Provided by publisher.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019022940 (print) | LCCN 2019022941 (ebook) | ISBN
9781593279448 (paperback) | ISBN 1593279442 (paperback) | ISBN
9781593279455 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Computer games--Programming--Juvenile literature. |
Computer games--Design--Juvenile literature. | PuzzleScript (Computer
program language)--Juvenile literature.
Classification: LCC QA76.76.C672 A5844 2019 (print) | LCC QA76.76.C672
(ebook) | DDC 794.8/1525--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019022940
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019022941

No Starch Press and the No Starch Press logo are registered trademarks of No Starch Press, Inc. Other product and company names mentioned herein may be the trademarks of their respective owners. Rather than use a trademark symbol with every occurrence of a trademarked name, we are using the names only in an editorial fashion and to the benefit of the trademark owner, with no intention of infringement of the trademark.

The information in this book is distributed on an As Is basis, without warranty. While every precaution has been taken in the preparation of this work, neither the author nor No Starch Press, Inc. shall have any liability to any person or entity with respect to any loss or damage caused or alleged to be caused directly or indirectly by the information contained in it.

For the new generation, and for the generation who grew up without having the tools: Here they are.

ANNA ANTHROPY is a game designer, author, and educator. She lives in Chicago with her little black cat, Encyclopedia Frown, where she teaches game design as DePaul Universitys Game Designer in Residence.

STEPHEN LAVELLE lives in Berlin and makes games and tools for making games. Hes responsible for Puzzlescript, Bfxr, and Stephens Sausage Roll, amongst other things.

Thanks to Hax for making these books happen and to Caitlin for all she had to put up with. And to my perfect nebling Camilla Grace, for giving me a material reason to want these books in the world.

Video games can be playful, weird, exciting, curious, magical, and even downright scary. We enjoy playing games because they act like windows into other worlds, worlds that move and change as we play with them, worlds whose rules are different than our own. (Sometimes these rules seem to make more sense than ours.) Games can be places we visit for a short time or places we get lost in for long stretches at a time. Through games, we can try on other personas and explore different perspectives.

Whatever games might mean to you, you should know that you can make your own games. And its a lot easier than might you think! The Make Your Own Video Games series shows you how to make fun, interactive games from scratch using a few tools.

To create the games in this book in this series, youll need the following:

• Access to a computer
• An internet connection

Thats it! In this book, well work with a tool called PuzzleScript, which is designed for making puzzle games. Well create little objects and write rules that explain how they interact with each other.

Before you learn how to make games with PuzzleScript, lets first explore some history behind the games you enjoy today.

Games have been around forever, or at least since the start of civilization. In fact, our oldest ancestors made their own games from sheeps bones (the very first dice!). They used seeds and some holes in the dirt to make the game we now call Mancala. Tic-tac-toe was first played more than 3,000 years ago in Egypt!

Games existed long before other activities, such as writing, painting, and 3D movies. It seems like people were born to play. Whenever a group of people agrees to play by a certain set of rules, a new game is born. As these games pass on to new players, the new group puts its own unique spin on it. For example, a tag player might wonder, Wouldnt tag be more exciting if you could rescue people whove been tagged? And just like that, a new rule is born: games grow and change over time, like weird plants.

Games that are designed by a group of people instead of just one person are called folk games. No one person invented tag. More likely, tag had a million different authors who each added their own little touches. This is why so many different versions of tag, like flashlight tag, freeze tag, and kick the can, exist today. All it took was someone to come up with another, more fun, way to play the game, and the rest was history.

The mobile games on your phones are designer games, which were made by a single person or a team of people. They arent folk games, but theyre still the result of people playing games and trying to come up with different ways to improve a game or create new games using their imagination.

While playing a game, have you ever thought, This game would be so much cooler if it just had this! If so, you have the makings of a great game designer.

In the 1960s, computers were the size of an entire room: these huge computers were called mainframes. Because computers were so expensive and complicated, only a few people could use them to make video games.