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The "Creating a Game Character" Lesson is part of the full, Get Kids into Coding with Scratch course featured in this preview video. Here's what you'd learn in this lesson:

Steve demonstrates creating a custom sprite by utilizing the paint option.

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Transcript from the "Creating a Game Character" Lesson

[00:00:00]
>> We're gonna make a game. We're gonna call it, I mean you can, for any of these, I know that I can't stop you. So you can take your own liberties for whatever you wanna do here, but we're gonna make a game, I am gonna make a game called Taco Chase.

[00:00:15]
Cuz I like tacos, if you prefer to chase Cheesy Puffs, you can chase Cheesy Puffs. If you would prefer to chase an apple, you can chase an apple. You can chase whatever you wanna chase. But for me, I am gonna chase a taco. So I'm gonna go ahead, and I'm gonna make a new file.

[00:00:35]
And all of these are saved automatically. And if you want to find them later, you can go into my stuff and you will find your stuff in my stuff. All right, so first of all, in this one, what I'm gonna do is, I'm gonna have a little game where you can kind of go up, down, left, and right, and you're just looking for a taco, right?

[00:00:57]
And when you find that taco, it will move, that is life summarized, right, it's exemplary. You saw I did the demo at the beginning snake. Imagine snake without a tail, right? And we'll add to it, we'll add some game mechanics in a little bit. So the first thing I'm gonna do and I'm gonna give you all a second do this as well, but I will just kind of show you just some of the Sprite editing tools as well.

[00:01:24]
Cuz it's gonna be sort of a top down, this part is not gonna do the trick for me. So I can go ahead, I'm gonna make a new costume first, I'm gonna get rid of the existing ones. So I can go to this little Choose a Costume, we're gonna paint.

[00:01:40]
You can make your own in a second, but I'm gonna make mine and so I'm gonna make a circle, now pro tip. You can hit the circle and you can do this and you can try to get a perfect circle and maybe you can pull it off. I don't know, maybe you're better than me.

[00:01:55]
You hit a Delete key or if you hold Shift, you automatically make a perfect circle no matter what. So I'm gonna make this little perfect circle right here. Looks pretty good. You're gonna change things up for circle. You can take this little mouse, you can change this color to whatever you want.

[00:02:15]
You can even make it a gradient if you want, that's horrifying. You can change the color. You can even select a color from the somewhere in the screen, cool, make it a little darker. I think I need some personality though, you know what I mean? So let's go ahead, I'm gonna make some eyes.

[00:02:39]
I'm gonna make the thickness a little less. We'll make the fill of this one a solid color. Be nice if I can stop right clicking by accident. Cool, and what I'll do is, I will, gotta hold shift, never mind. Make an eye, and then we'll change it to black.

[00:03:02]
Make a little smaller one, cool. Change back to the mouse and pop it in there. Let's make it look a little less crazy. There we go. If I wanna treat as one group, I can group it and that I can just copy paste. Selected everything. Now I got two eyes.

[00:03:34]
Let's put them on our hero, awesome. Does he need a mouth or is that eyes are good enough, right? Eyes are good enough? Cool, so now we've got a little hero ready to go and ready to eat some tacos. Great, we can go ahead and delete some of these old ones as well.

[00:03:56]
So he doesn't do anything yet. Does my hero have a name?
>> Dave.
>> Dave. All right, we got Dave. Dave's ready to eat some tacos Now Dave needs a taco, right? [LAUGH] This game doesn't have a lot yet, let's give Dave a taco. So we'll go here, we'll choose a Sprite.

[00:04:18]
It's almost like I happen to know there's a taco in here already. As you can see, it has a second costume where it is a wizard.
>> [LAUGH]
>> I would resist every urge not to do something with that at some point. All right is this taco is way too big.

[00:04:34]
You're like agree to disagree, but [LAUGH] let's assume that the taco is too big. Rather than adding a Sprite, what I'm just gonna do is I'm gonna say the size is point let's say, let's try 30. Too big? Too small? Just right? Let's try 25. That feels better.

[00:04:51]
It feels like relative, I mean, still a big taco for a hero, but thank for us to see. Pretty, pretty good.

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