Intuition's Slalom - A Scratch Game

On Monday, I discovered a Web 2.0 online community website called Scratch. It looks like one of those sweet MIT experiment project things. You can download the Scratch application, do what is the equivalent of programming with Lego pieces, and post your creation - which would likely be a game or animation - on the Scratch community website for people to look at. I think it's a fantastic way to bring programming to the masses. So I was inspired to make a game.

I've had this idea for a while. The game is called Slalom. You have an avatar, and you must move the avatar to one side of a falling object. The side you want to be on is toward the word that corresponds to the color of the falling object itself. For example, you have to move to the right side of a red falling object if the word "red" is on the right.

The challenge of the game lies in the fact that the words switch sides and eventually switch colors. So the word "red" might be on the left but might be the color blue. You need to be on the left side of the red ball even though the text is the color blue. The little mind puzzle has been around for a long time - psychologists would often do this to mess with people. Recently, this kind of puzzle was used in the Nintendo DS game Brain Training.

Overall, the game took me just a couple days to make. It would have been quite a bit faster, but the Scratch application needs some work in my opinion. It's not object oriented, so you have to workaround ways to get values out of the objects. What really needs to happen is that Adobe needs to make a version of this app that sits on Flash. If they managed that, they would start yet another revolution.

Play the game here and let us know what you think.