Today we are going to do a step by step video tutorial showing you how you can create an entire simple game using Microsoft MakeCode Arcade. We looked at the MakeCode game engine last year and it is one of the best game engines for beginners to get started developing games. In MakeCode Arcade you create your game using a series of visual blocks much like other beginner focused game engines. Where MakeCode is different than most however you can also programming in either JavaScript or Python and it will automatically be translated to visual blocks. This approach gives a good migration path into fully coding your game.
MakeCode also provides all of the tools required to make a game including sprite and map editors, simple music tools and more. In this tutorial we create a simple PacMan inspired game, embedded below.
You can open this project and play around with it yourself at https://makecode.com/_XKwHY5DK32fd. Simply click the Edit Code button to open it in the MakeCode Editor.
The MakeCode tutorial is slightly longer than 30 minutes and is available in the video below. If you are interested in learning more about Microsoft MakeCode Arcade you can check out the documentation available here.
Microsoft MakeCode is built on top of the pxt or Programming eXperience Toolkit, which is an open source project available on GitHub under the MIT open source license, so if you are interested in making your own visual interface, this is a good place to start.