TL;DR;
Just wanted to share: I created a little tool for my kids to Build Games in Scratch, called Scratch Optimizer. Free for anyone to use.
Not sure if this is the best forum for this, but I’ve been working on a few projects and have tried dozen of coding tools to assist with them. Cline VS Code Plugin and Windsurf being the most useful so far (with Bolt.diy getting better by the day). The idea is to just become more productive. And I would love to develop and work on AI related stuff full time.
I maintain a small Pip/PyPi package called py7zip, working on prm (Pull Request Manager; a wrapper to toggle on and off PR’s real-time), and am working on a bolt-terminal to replace the current and limited Web Container. And there’s a lot more, but that is why I NEED AI to be useful, lol.
And those are all awesome projects, but over the holidays I was helping my son start making games in Scratch and so I took a crash course, and when I take a new project on, I take a pretty deep dive. So I built a preliminary template with motion controls, animations, and etc. But to learn you look at what others have done, and I quickly found many cool but bloated games with redundant logic, unnecessary steps, and legacy features that did not work in modern scratch (v2 vs v3). This made it so you could basically not “fork” the game and therefor not modify. And without modifying and testing, how can you learn?
Then I found a platform for converting games to JS called TurboWarp Packager, and started building a little library that my Kids and I could play over their tablets and me on PC or Phone. It added full screen, joystick, and other very cool support. But as I said, not everything would work. I also found TurboWarp (expands the capabilities and performance of scratch) to be very cool as well.
So I decided to make a tool to optimized scratch projects (namely games) and generally fixed the issues I encountered. It’s still a work in progress, but I think it’s at a good stage to share. I made the app support Cloudflare Pages for easy/free deployment, and added PWA offline-on-device support. So you can “install” it onto a phone or tablet and it doesn’t need the internet. It’s fully permissive open source (MIT) and free to use, no deployment needed.
And any feedback or suggestions are welcome!