hiya. this is gonna be a long rant so beware so... the state of scratch rn isn't... this site's definitely seen better days. the age verification thing was a bit strange, but i initially passed it off as smth to do with the online safety act that was recently passed, but seems like all users from any location under a certain age are also receiving this. so turns out scratch is now using project data to train ai. ...i'm not really okay with that. i'm not against AI, it has its benefits and its downsides, but i am against using data from (mostly) kid-created content to train AI. that just seems really off to me. i don't know what's going on behind the scenes that led scratch's developers (or whoever was responsible for making this change) to this decision, so I don't want to put much of the blame on them, but... this is kinda ridiculous. (edit: there's honestly so much backlash against this that I'm sorta hoping they might take a U-turn on the whole idea, but once again idk what's going on behind the scenes, maybe this is required to keep scratch running, idk) as a result ive also been focusing more on my itch.io recently, since... ima be completely honest... ... ...i'm done with this site. probably wasn't a surprise to many of you considering my recent inactivity plus the rant above, but... honestly so many other people are leaving and there's not much reason to stay i'll probably still post updates on this account through my WIWO like i usually do, and I might post small tests and projects and stuff but... if i'm gonna make a game from now on, it's not gonna be on here. sorry. i have checked out scratch alternatives with independent communities, but they all have at least one pretty substantial disadvantage (i could rant about penguinmod for days lol) actually made me appreciate how well-designed the scratch site/editor actually is so right now, itch.io it is for me ig there's so many benefits, there's the whole jam aspect (will try participating in GMTK 26 btw), custom profile pages, monetisation options (scratch doesn't offer this, but this is fair enough for a kids site), no filterbot (some massive benefits and massive downsides to this lol), loads of SMM ppl are moving there too* i'm not gonna link my itch.io here simply bc i'm not sure yet whether i want my games to be riddled with comments like "HIII ik you from SCRATCH, can you make another mario game plz" and "hi mario2164 what happened to savepak? i asked for devkit yesterday and never got one i want one now" and stuff like that. ik most of you guys wouldn't do that, but... still not worth the risk. if you've seen the itch comments for Brad's Polly the Frog games you'll know what I mean also, another reason why i'm moving is bc it seems like smm is declining, and fast many of the ppl in the community have left, or are thinking of leaving in favour of game engines like godot, godot and even godot i have tried godot, ive never been able to get fully into it though, it seems like a cool game engine but considering i've built a lot of my engines (saving engines, platform engines, etc) from the ground up on this platform and therefore have gotten used to making systems myself, i don't think i'd enjoy game engines as much as i would game frameworks like Love2D and stuff. i have also tried unity, but definitely won't use it long term because of the pricing plans and stuff i have tried unreal too, i even got scorch marks on my desk to go with it :D i might even consider using turbowarp? it's actually pretty capable as an engine, it's got insane iteration speeds (since code is interpreted you just click the flag and go, compared to most game engines which compile your code and take a decent amount of time to playtest), only downside is the blocks (i do prefer text based coding) but considering how long ive been using block-based code i don't think it'll be too much of a problem? this description is way longer than it needed to be lol i could've finished this all up in a couple of paragraphs one final thing though... thanks so much everyone :D really enjoyed the five years i spent on here happy to answer any questions you have in the comments ...however i might come back maybe in a couple of months maybe in a couple of years who knows ive never been able to commit to fully leaving the platform before, i've got more leaving projects from the early 2020s than i do actual games lol * i've been thinking, would be pretty cool if we got SMM devs all in one team for a jam together? Maybe GMTK? idk, would be really cool tho alr, cya :D
