This Saturday Oct 20 Punk Arcade will be open at Little Berlin from noon to 5. From 2-4PM we will be hosting a WORKSHOP on DIY Game-making, in the spirit of Glorious Trainwrecks. It will be Quick and Dirty, for beginners (or not), and a bit of a mess. We’ll be using Scratch, the dead-simple programming language for kids/complete beginners created by MIT Media Lab. Rather than write code, you snap together code blocks like legos. Programs are easily shared online and you can open up programs to explore how they work. It works on Mac, PC, Linux. Download it onto a laptop, open up some examples and see how they work, play around, and bring it if you can. If not, that’s okay, we’ll partner people up to make games.

Optional background reading:

Generating And Refining Your Game Idea from Dames Making Games/Toronto

Managing Your Jam Experience from same site is also interesting and has useful info on creating a flowchart, defining the game, and task list, but keep in mind this is for a 10-day game jam!

How to make a simple game by Megan and Caity is amazing. I found it when I searched youtube for videos on how to make simple Scratch games. I think they’re in a high school classroom. Totally punk!

Scratch Beginners Tutorial: Simple Game is great, teaches you how to make a “keep away” game that reminds me of Homestarrunner’s Trogdor game. Speaking of which, all of the “Videlectrix” games are inspirations.

Bonus: Rise Of The Videogame Zinesters (and here too) by Anna Anthropy