1. Escape Games and Randomness

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Hey, and welcome to day five of Scratch Games.

Today, you'll create an escape game, where the player's character must avoid bouncing sprites.

This game will introduce randomness, as well as a Scratch variable, the timer.

Randomness is an important concept, used in many different games, for example, whenever you play a game that involves rolling a die, such as Monopoly, each roll gives you a random number between one and six.

Randomness is often used in video games as well.

In the Pokemon video games, players encounter Pokemon randomly in the wild.

You never know when you're going to see a wild Pokemon, or even a Pokemon you might encounter.

Randomness is also important for sport games.

For example, football video games use randomness to ensure that unexpected things happen, no matter how many times the player plays the game.

This includes everything from plays that are called, to having the computer players fumble and intercept the ball at a random points in the game.

Randomness can help keep games interesting and fun.

In today's game, the player must control a sprite to avoid enemies that are randomly moving around.

This game is fun, because the enemies move in random directions.

You won't know where the enemies will go next.

The next screencast will begin to guide you through the programming of this game.

But first, you need to design your project.

Take a minute to open Scratch, sign in and create a new project.

Add a backdrop and add two sprites.

One is the player and the other as the chaser.

After you finish these steps, move on to the next screencast.

(gentle music)