Are you interested in creating your own interactive stories and games? In this tutorial, we will explore how to use Scratch to create a game. Scratch is a visual programming language perfect for beginners but powerful enough for advanced projects.
First, you’ll need to go to the Scratch website and create an account. It’s free and easy to do. Once you’ve created your account, you’ll be taken to the Scratch homepage. Here, you can explore other projects, but for now, let’s focus on creating our own.
Open up your preferred web browser and go to the Scratch website
Click on the “Join Scratch” button in the top-right corner of the page.
Fill out the registration form with your desired username, password, and email address. You can also add an avatar image if you like.
Click on the “Join Scratch” button at the bottom of the registration form to create your account.
You’ll learn how to create a new project in Scratch and get started on programming your first game. With a blank canvas in front of you, the possibilities are endless. Let’s dive in!
After opening your first project, you will see the programming environment of your “Untitled” project. Here, you can choose a name for your project.
Select a backdrop from the library or upload your own.
Don’t forget to save your project regularly by clicking on the “Save” button on the top right corner of the screen.
Add a new Sprite by clicking on the round button in the bottom left corner. You can upload your own image or choose from a large library of characters.
From the collection of images, choose the character you want for your game.
Since we do not need the original sprite of the cat for our game, you can remove the character from your project.
For our game, we will need our game character to be at the bottom of the screen, so just drag the character to the bottom of the screen with your mouse cursor.
We will now make these characters interact with the environment and the player of the game. Simple steps will create a simple and fun gaming experience.
In Scratch, the left part of the screen contains all the commands required to write a program (for example the yellow blocks in box 1).
The main program controlling your current character will be in the main area in the middle (box 2 on the image here). With your mouse cursor, drag the block “when (space) pressed” into the middle.
The yellow block is an event block, executing every block under it when the correct event happens. When pressing right arrow, we want our character to move to the right, so we need to increase his position on the “x axis”:
We now also want to move our character to the left. Try adding a second event block and a command below to make this work.
You now have a moving character. Let us now add a small falling object for the character to collect.
Add a second game object to the project in the same way as before (see boy 1) and place the new object at the top of the screen.
Make sure to click on your new object (see box 1) to be able to program the object.
We now want to start the game when pressing the space button, so we add a new “when (space) key pressed” event block to the program of the object (as in box 2).
We can now finish coding the game objects to make a working game with a score and a clear goal.
After we start a game by pressing “Space”, we want the object to fall until it reaches the bottom of the screen. We need to program three steps:
When the character touches the falling object, it should be collected and restart at the top of the screen by adding this block into the program of the falling object:
The new object should not start in the middle, but always at a different position. By using a random operator block “pick random”, the “x axis” value of the new object will always change:
In Scratch, variables are like containers that can hold different types
of information, such as numbers, text, or even other blocks of code.
They are useful for storing and manipulating data that might change over time or in response to events in the game.
For this game, you want to keep track of the number of objects your
character has collected. This will occur in a “Score” variable, that
counts the number of objects that are collected.
Generate a new variable called “Score” and add commands to the code to always start with 0 points and add 1 point for every collected object.
Use the “set (Score)” block at the beginning of the program (box 2) and use the “change (Score)” block when the falling object touches your character. (box 3)
Adding a fun message at the end of the program lets the user know that one round of the game is finished. Use the looks block “say …” at the end of the program.
Congratulations, you just finished your first game. Now you can explore many fun ideas to make the game bigger or more complex. A few ideas will be presented in the next step.
Now, be creative and expand your game. A few ideas and challenges for you to try are listed here, if you need some guidance.
You can try to make the following ideas work. Details here will be added in the future.
