Free motion backgrounds (simple and light)

Question

My son, a ten year old, has started working with Scratch. He has made a car driving scene with my help. In the process the first thing he learned was that not the object (the car), but the background should move. From there we got to the notion of background loops for continues playback. I want to keep the fun parts in balance with the labor-intensive parts. So I searched for motion backgrounds, but the sites I found have motion backgrounds in HD movie and too polished. In Scratch the focus is on making things work, not producing professional looking games.

So I wonder if someone knows a resource where simple motion backgrounds in the style of old console games could be found. This, ideally, would be a series of images, but if not, video could be used to produce that too.

Answer 1

I've never used scratch, but why don't you just take a picture or drawing and have its position move? For example if it's just a car driving along a road, have the kid draw a scene for the car to go on, then have him make a background object that's x value decreases every frame. Then have him see that the background needs to loop. Then you could teach him the importance of a looping background, and how both sides have to line up etc. Also if he draws a sun or something he could see that it shouldn't be on the loop and should be moving at a separate speed, which could give him an early understanding of parallax backgrounds. It could also show him that you can do anything to make stuff work when it comes to game design, as long as it gets the job done.

Answer 2

If you want a simple background and have minimal artistic skills I suggest a combination of mypaint and GIMP. With some of the built-in brushes and backgrounds for mypaint you can quickly draw some really nice images. Mypaint natively can save transparent pngs (which it looks like Scratch supports on a cursory glance through the docs), so you could easily draw a simple road and a tree or something. Here's one with a transparent BG that I just did in about 3 minutes with the mouse: