| “ | Hello fellow Scratchers! |
” |
―griffpatch’s intro | ||
Andrew Griffin (born 1977–1978 [age 46–47]), better known online as griffpatch, is an English game developer and YouTuber who is the most followed user on the Scratch website, at 500,000 followers. On his YouTube channel, he posts game development tutorials for Scratch, which are aimed towards beginners through to advanced programmers and educators.
On October 24, 2012, he joined the website, on which he posts games, some of which are ports. He also operates another Scratch account, griffpatch_tutor, mainly for testing and to provide assets for tutorials.[1]
History[]
Early life[]
At the age of 8, griffpatch, alongside his brother Psiborg,[2] started programming using BBC Basic on an Acorn Electron with the help of books and his mother. He later upgraded to an Amstrad CPC6128, on which he first learned assembly, then the Amiga 500 at the age of 13, making games for AmigaOS. One of these games is Snail, which he later recreated in Scratch.[3]
Flagz screenshot
While studying computer science at university, he learned Borland Pascal, which made game development slower due to a lack of basic game libraries. He got his first PC during this time, which featured a 486 DX and 4MB RAM, writing two games in Turbo Pascal and assembly in 1996, one of which is Flagz, a platformer where the flags must be collected as quickly as possible. The game directly accessed the graphics and sound hardware via custom libraries written in assembly, with additional programming in Turbo Pascal, and could run on PCs with a 33MHz CPU and 2MB of RAM.
He also learned Ada, C, Java and Prolog, as well as algorithm and data structure, theory, hardware (e.g. building and wiring PCs), etc.. His games were popular, one of which was a network game called Shipfat. It was so popular in computer labs lecturers were unable to access the network. After university, he stopped programming games, but got a job in programming, and played guitar and created music on his computer in his spare time.
Career[]
Paper Minecraft screenshot
griffpatch discovered Scratch in 2010 or 2011 when his older son's school announced a computer club that would use it, subsequently downloading the then-current Scratch 1.4 to teach him some basics. He created the griffpatch account on October 24, 2012 for both of them to share, initially indifferent to the website, but reinvigorated his interest in game development after starting to make projects himself.
During the Scratch 2.0 Beta website's rise, he decided to create accounts for his three children, griffinboy,[4] griffingirl[5] and griffingirl2, of which only the last is active.[6] He shared his first project, Pacman HD with full Ghost AI (Scratch 2), on January 29, 2013,[7] later making a 16 frame walk cycle of the website's mascot Scratch Cat for his game Scratchnapped.[8] Due to the game's popularity, it was featured by the Scratch Team on both the Scratch 2.0 Beta and 2.0 websites, and he soon reached 100 followers. Seeing many Scratchers trying to recreate parts of Minecraft, he decided to recreate the game. With some research, he created a 2D adaptation called Paper Minecraft, as he had never played it.[9]
griffpatch has released three Scratch extensions: Box2d.js (adds Box2D physics support to Scratch 2,[10] later updated for 3 in 2019),[11] Scratch Messaging Extension in 2016 (later merged into Scratch Addons) and Scratch 3 Developer Tools in 2019 for Scratch 3 on Firefox, Chrome and Edge, adding a Find function and improved block tidying.[12][13][14]
He originally posted random videos (some deleted), often Scratch-related, until April 12, 2018, when he started making game programming tutorials for Scratch. He has performed speedruns of some of his games.
Personal life[]
griffpatch works as a Java programmer. As well as developing games in his spare time, he is creative in general and a church drummer.[15] He has three children, all of whom have Scratch accounts: griffinboy,[4] griffingirl[5] and griffingirl2, of which only the last is active.[6]
Trivia[]
- griffpatch has learned various programming languages, such as Python, C++, JavaScript (ES6), Java, Prolog, Ada, BASIC and Logo.[16]
- One of his Scratch projects, a recreation of Geometry Dash, has the largest number of views on the website, at over 103 million. This is more than the total views of CrystalKeeper7, who has the second most views, at over 67 million.[17][9][18]
- griffpatch also has the largest numbers of loves, favorites and views on Scratch, at over 2.8 million, 2.5 million and 250 million respectively.
Channel milestones[]
Subscriber milestones[]
- 100 thousand subscribers: January 3, 2022
- 200 thousand subscribers: October 27, 2022
Video view milestones[]
- 10 million views: December 27, 2021
- 20 million views: May 30, 2022
- 30 million views: January 22, 2023
Gallery[]
References[]
- ↑ https://scratch.mit.edu/users/griffpatch_tutor
- ↑ https://scratch.mit.edu/users/Psiborg
- ↑ https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/91723110
- ↑ 4.0 4.1 https://scratch.mit.edu/users/griffinboy
- ↑ 5.0 5.1 https://scratch.mit.edu/users/griffingirl
- ↑ 6.0 6.1 https://scratch.mit.edu/users/griffingirl2
- ↑ https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/10016238
- ↑ https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/10045024
- ↑ 9.0 9.1 https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/10128407
- ↑ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3nBQY3oqxX4
- ↑ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HRa9QcCQMHU
- ↑ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/scratch-3-developer-tools
- ↑ https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/scratch-3-developer-tools/phacniajokfchdcamjhonkbhlcipplno
- ↑ https://microsoftedge.microsoft.com/addons/detail/scratch-3-developer-tools/nfhcllbnpcpjggojjjliodclgjadggmj
- ↑ https://scratch.mit.edu/users/griffpatch
- ↑ https://scratchstats.com/Will_Wam
- ↑ https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/105500895
- ↑ https://scratchstats.com/CrystalKeeper7