It’s Raining Bread

Scratch is a really great platform that helps teach kids about programming.  It gives them all the tools they need to make actual programs, but it’s set up in an easy and fun way.  It’s a far cry from the tools we had when I was a kid, which basically convinced me that I would never be a programmer.

My kids go to this school called Litalico, which teaches young ones to do all sorts of STEMy stuff.  My youngest has veered towards 3D modeling, and has become quite adept at TinkerCAD, using it to design and 3D print a variety of cool things.  (Insert the obligatory “back in my day, we only had Play-Doh and Silly Putty” old man thing here.)

My oldest has leaned towards programming in Scratch, which has given him a chance to experience what how the sausage is made when it comes to developing games.

Show and Tell

My oldest showed off his first game, that without his knowledge or permission I’m going to show you here.  It’s officially titled “クリックゲーム” (Click Game), and it’s exactly that.  There is a genre called “clicker games,” where you basically click on something on the screen to amass points, which you use to buy power-ups that give you more points per click, all while getting carpal tunnel in the process.

Click Game‘s motif is French bread. When I asked why he chose the theme of bread, he said, “I don’t know.”  I’m guessing he was hungry at the time. 

Anyway, let’s take a deep dive into the oven-fresh world of Click Game.

Breadstorm

The first thing you notice is a delightful baguette, floating in the air, ever so enticing.  Notice the tasteful wheat field in the background, a good choice by my boy.  There’s a Bakery to the right, but we’ll get there in a minute.

At the top you have your score, and in this world, score means piping hot, crusty loaves.  On the left, you have the number of baguettes you get per click, as well as the number of loaves that you get automatically per second.

When you click the baguette, baby baguettes fall out of it!  To me, this is genius.  Imagine a mother loaf of bread, that you could touch and it would give instant birth to delicious baby loaves.  There’s your cure to world hunger right there.

So now on to the Bakery, which has four options:

1. Increase the number of loaves per click. This costs you 25 loaves.
2. Increase the number of automatically generated loaves by 1 per second (cost = 100).
3. Increase the number of automatically generated loaves by 10 per second (cost = 500).
4. Increase the number of automatically generated loaves by 500 per second (cost = 6500).

The strategy is to try to increase the number of baguettes that get automatically generated, and once you get to the point where you are making 500 per second automatically, you are at Bread Tycoon status.

Please Sir, Can I Have Some More?

And that’s basically it.  There’s no real end goal, but the gamer in me wanted one, so I decided to try to break the scoreboard, retro arcade game style.  I don’t know what it says about me as a father that I’m trying to break my son’s game, but there ya go.

My first thought was that maybe the score would stop at 9999, or break out of the background box — but no!  The boxes expand.  My son thought of everything.

So I got to the point where I could hammer the 6500 thing over and over, with that being the more profitable click point than the baguette. I needed a new goal.  As I got into the millions, my new end game was set — I need to get to “billions and billions served.”

And there you have it, billions and billions served, and I have unofficially beat my son’s game.  I gave the baguette a couple of good clicks for old times’ sake, and went to make a sandwich.

The Future Is Soon

I’m very proud of my boys, and it’s a joy to watch them as they enjoy learning and creating.  With a budding programmer as well as an artist in the Cellucci family, I feel the future of my dev studio is secure.  Or maybe I can just use them as cheap labor.