1. Launcher Games and Randomness

Hey and welcome to Scratch Games day 6! In today’s club session, you will make a launching game.

While creating this game, you’ll learn about an important computer science concept: variables, as well as a game-creation concept: increasing difficulty.

In the game you’ll make today, the player must launch and navigate a sprite across a screen of bouncing enemies. If the player reaches the finish line, a point is added to their score, and a new enemy is added to the game.

This game uses variables to make the game more difficult.

You may have encountered "variables" in math class, like the x or y you solve for in algebra equations.

Variables in computer science are very similar.

When the code runs, it tells the computer to replace the variable with data from that storage location.

In many sports video games, you can easily see the values of some variables. In a football game, each football player might have many different attributes, all of which are stored in variables. In the game, the variable will hold the player’s score.

As the player’s score gets higher, the game will get more difficult.

To get started, open the starter project link on this page. Then, add a sprite that the player can control. This example project will use a fish, but you can use any sprite you like for yours. You will probably want to shrink the sprite to make it a better size for this game. Once you’ve done that, move on to the next screencast.