Where to start

[Marco Isella]

 

Hi,

 

I want to develop something that looks like Scratch. You can see it in action in this short video. 

 

What are the skills I need to learn? 

I'm a professional developer with basic javascript background but never handled graphics in js or html5 (I have with java and other languages).

Are there courses that could speed up my learning curve?

 

Thanks 

 

Marco

[mattstyles]

Same way you learnt how to code in the first, dive in and get your hands dirty!

Read lots of posts, grab some books if thats your thing, search for videos if you enjoy that.

If you're used to handling graphics in other languages, the philosophy is the same for the web and JS, if the language allows it (JS is super permissive) then the techniques you learned before should be directly portable to JS. If you get into using a library to help with sprite manipulation etc etc then they will almost certainly be based on previous works, very little new under the sun.

Scratch looks like a web app, so maybe gaming-related techniques aren't a natural fit anyway.

JS has a symbolic link to HTML/CSS and that can not be avoided with the browser, although you can make it look very much like other languages if you try to ignore the DOM as much as possible and use the canvas, this approach can be a poor one ultimately though as the DOM brings many advantages (although with some bad), particularly in your case, the scratch case, I don't think it would be beneficial to remain purely in the canvas element, manipulating the DOM with JS for UI-heavy stuff is fairly natural and intuitive and it is well defined so there are plenty of resources if you get stuck with anything.

JS is super permissive so its riddled with gotchas, try not to get annoyed with it. It's a very simple language, but with that simplification comes many footguns. Stick with it through those bad points and learn/use some design patterns to help smooth out some of JS's nasty edges.