[https://scratch.mit.edu/use his spare time he makes games (especially in Scratch) and also drumming in church. He has 3 children (griffinboy, griffingirl and griffingirl2)
History[]
Early Life[]
He started programming in BBC Basic on an Acorn Electron when he was 8 years old, along with his brother Psiborg. He learned coding using books with help from his mom. He later used an Amstrad 6128 (still programming in Basic), however this is when he learned Assembly. When he was 13, he used an Amiga A500 to allow him (for the first time) to make games. He programmed in Amiga OS and coded a few good games. Without internet at the time, there was no way to be published. At this time he wrote a game called snail which he later recreated in Scratch.
He then took computer science and learned to program in Borland Pascal (Now Turbo Pascal). He got his first PC in that time (Pentium 286 DX with 4MB RAM.) Programming in Pascal slowed down his game development because it lacked the basic game libraries supported by Amiga OS on the Amiga. In 1996, griffpatch wrote 2 games using Turbo Pascal and Assembly. One of the games is called Flagz, a platformer game. All graphics and sound libraries were written in assembly directly accessing the graphics and sound hardware, etc. Even the graphics were hand drawn by himself using his own home coded graphics package.
At university he studied Computer Science learning various programming languages like Ada, C, Java and Prolog, along with theory of algorithm and data structure, etc. Also, hardware lessons were taken like building and wiring the PC. At his university, he had many audience for his games, so he wrote his own graphics package (Pascal + Assembly), for the first time created a network game called Shipfat which became very popular in PC Labs. This caused troubles, such as the network traffic taking down PCs in lecturers class. After his university days his game programming came to an end as he got his job where he programmed applications. In his free time he played guitar and created music on his computer.
Scratch Life[]
Several years later in the early 2010's, his eldest son's school announced that they were running a computer club and they were going to introduce Scratch, and this is the time when he knew Scratch. He downloaded Scratch 1.4 so that he could teach his son some basics. At this time Scratch 2.0 was never there and never bothered about the website, but he created a shared account for all (griffpatch and his son) called ‘Griffpatch’.
Then he started making projects in the Scratch 1.4 Offline Editor (as at the time, you needed to download an application to upload projects to the website, and not directly on the website itself like it is now). This is when he felt enjoyable again about creating games like he done before. When Scratch 2.0 Beta and the Beta site was emerging, he decided to make seperate accounts for his children and he officially became griffpatch. His first game known that is still available is Pacman HD with full Ghost AI (Scratch 2.0). Not long after, he made a walking animation for his game "Scratchnapped" which got featured twice by the Scratch Team 9; the Scratch 2.0 site which his number of followers and fame started increasing steadily(One in beta site and other in completed 2.0 site). He reached 100 followers and was blown away. Scratchnapped game accelerated his fame and also was his first popular game. Then later when he was thinking for his next popular game, and he saw many scratchers trying to recreate bits of Minecraft. He never played Minecraft but he tried finding information and checking some projects creating the bits of the project, learning what it was and creating the basic game engine for it. Soon he made the most popular project in Scratch until now, Paper Minecraft, and made updates every year reaching 20 million views.
Then on his Youtube Channel he started making tutorials. Later in 2016, he made the Box2D extension for Scratch 2.0, and then in 2019 made the extension of BOX2D for Scratch 3.0. He also made a browser extension for Scratch 3.0 called Scratch 3 Developer Tools which is a really useful tool that helps to search for Scratch Blocks that you put in the scripting area in case you're making a project. This project was forked in github and eventually a new updated browser extension called Scratch Addons was released. This was maintained by several scratchers like World_Languages.
