I first joined scratch around 2017, 7 years ago, maybe 2018? After that I was active for probably 2-3 years before I left for a long time, during those 2-3 years I made many crappy projects I felt proud of. I also annoyed many people by spamming them invites to useless studios, sometimes multiple times a day, this led me to be in over 600 studios, most of which DIED. I participated in RPGs, spamming, closing tabs on suspicious pages, the scratch wiki (I gotta check that) failing to copy the platformer code, and more. Then I left suddenly What really happened was somebody was talking about depression and "The End of Things" and invited me to this studio, I thought it was weird and coincidentally closed the tab when my mom walked in, she then went through my history and found I was in "The Studio of Spam" and was spamming. So I got kicked off Over time I slowly used it again, and then left again, at that point due to reasons IDK. Then I started learning Godot around summer of 2024, and came back to scratch to make my raycasting engine, then that summer I got all my devices taken away, then in October I got swapped over to a public school from being homeschooled, and now will be using scratch on a Chromebook. I am learning Unity and Blender at the moment in school however cannot do them at home as my PC runs 4gb ram with an Intel pentium 4400U and intergrated graphics 510 (Read as: Very bad, 8 fps in Minecraft whilst standing still on a server (less lag that way on a server with just you) with performance mods) There's my back story, read below for my thoughts.
THOUGHTS (Read above for back story) My thoughts right now are that on scratch, being generic and lazy is how you get fame, and being good is how you get no fame besides a couple followers that worship you almost cult like (That's a bit of exaggeration) Currently go ahead and look at the most popular games, some parallax mouse movement art projects, maybe an animation (Those are hard though, respect if its good, whoever made the series with the joke episode about Doritos and cheese puffs and was about Slatch or something good job.) You will also find Platformers, generic ones, never really changing anything besides art, all using near the same physics engine. Right now, Scratch is 90% art skills, and 10% programming, why? Because we LIKE similar things that don't break the mold, especially as children and younger teens, so playing the same platformer for the 5th time with some different levels is fine, and the art makes it FEEL new. You also see tower defenses, but when those are popular they are generally good, but some people do make the same tower defense 500 times with different art and music. I also acknowledge the fact that on rare occasion, talent does get recognized and a project DOES get seen for what it is, a place to do game design that is unique, not the same low effort copy pasted physics engine platformer or low effort clicker. I explained why the same physics engine of platformer is so popular, due to familiarity bias, but not why clicker games are. Clickers are the ULTIMATE source of dopamine, imagine getting paid to work, the payment is a reward, now imagine if you just got paid for working a single hour of your life and after that point your gain for money just went up every day, getting free money, that's a clicker in a nutshell. The bigger the number, the more our brains like it (If the object is not hostile or scary) and clickers do this in the best way. I will not link examples of any poor quality projects, the search bar is right there. I don't make quality projects either, but I just want to acknowledge how screwed up scratches system is, there is probably ways to better the system, but I am tired right now, I will go ahead now and give you all a list of projects I personally thing are good quality and should be recognized. You may already know some of these but you may discover something cool! This is a hard to understand card game with around 8000 cards. Laser Tower Defense: A tower defense but a good one tbh, it is a bit unbalanced but fun, also check his polygon tower defense! Crystal Seeker 3D: This is a full 3D platformer in scratch that runs well enough. Super Scratch Bros: This is very good, check it out. This animation expresses the issue pretty well I will find more later
