When we began to create Scratch games, one feeling in common is that we have ideas on how to realise it in code, but why are the pictures so “ugly”?

After all, artistic effects play an important role in the human’s feeling. If you don’t believe, you could just simply remove the backdrop of your Scratch game and check the difference of your visual impression on the game.

Big companies develop games with skilled professionals and specialized image processing tools, while small players also have their own way of playing, that is to emphasize creative ideas in their work.

This is especially true for the Scratch platform. Scratch’s limitations are hard to make beautifully crafted works. Therefore, we must make efforts to give full play to our creativity to make up for the shortcomings in artistic effect.

On Scratch’s official website, there are lots of creative works. Among the most popular Youtube games, Scratchnapped is a traditional Mario style jumping game but carefully designed plots and levels have won praises from many fans. The importance of creativity can be seen. On Scratch’s official website, such kind of creative works is not occasional.

So, what limits you are not art resources, but creativity. Give full play to our creativity and combine it with basic image processing skills and tools, we could achieve good visual effects for the game.

Know Scratch’s Displaying restrictions

Scratch’s resolution is 480*360. Compared to your computer screen, this resolution is very low, so people often feel that Scratch can not realize the exquisite visual effect. Under such a resolution, when you maximize your game window, the image will become course or blur.

Since the backdrop of the Scratch spreads at a ratio of 4:3, and the minimum image size is 480*360. I often use the image size of 960*720. In this way, the backdrop placed in Scratch will spread as the original ratio and be not be pulled up and deformed. Meanwhile, the image can still maintain a high degree of clarity when you maximize the game window.

Using Vector Graphics

The biggest advantage of vector graphics is that it will not be distorted when zooming in, zooming out or rotating. The biggest drawback is that it is difficult to express realistic image effects with rich color levels.

In Scratch, vector graphics is the most appropriate, which is why Scratch3.0, the styling editor is set to vector graphics by default.

Make Your Spirits Move

A moving spirit is better than a stand-still one. Try to make the picture full of dynamic, whether it is written by code or by switching the image. As long as the picture moves, the effect is much better.

Export Resources from Other Projects

You can use the resources provided by others, but don’t forget to give credit to them by specifying the source of your resource in your work.

Collect and Edit Your Resources on Internet

We will continue this topic in the next post. 🙂