Scratch Dodgeball

Joey Willems and Steven Richter

Computer Science and Software Engineering
September 22, 2015

Overview:
The purpose of this project was to demonstrate our overall knowledge of the
program Scratch. In this project we, as a group, worked together to make a basic game
that demonstrated our knowledge. As specified the project needed to:
1. User interaction
The user should be able to use keyboard and/or mouse input in a way that
fundamentally affects what happens.
2. Objective
The game should have an objective with several or as many degree of progress
toward the objective as possible. A score would be sufficient, but many
alternatives exist.
3. Multiple states
The game should include different states in order for the user to experience
variety. Levels during which the difficulty changes or bonus stages appear would
be sufficient, but many alternatives exist.
To follow these guidelines we were given from 9-15-15 to 9-22-15 to complete this
project.

Materials List:
Computer with Scratch, Internet access, Project notebook

Procedure:
Brainstorm ideas using tag lines and thumbnail sketches.

Pick 3 of your favorite ideas

Decide on one game using a decision matrix

Create a sketch of what you want it to look like

Create some pseudocode for the game

Experiment on scratch
Start to code and when something doesn't work go back to experimenting
Play Game to see if it worked
If it did not go back to experimenting to figure out the problem
Do this until you feel like you have a functional game.

Concepts Covered:
In this project we covered a variety of topics that we learned in 1.1. We learned
the stepper, the walker and the best so far variables. We also learned the role of
accumulators and we even used an accumulator in our game. As well as coding the sprites
using if then commands. We used the direction variable to dictate the way the ball goes.
Some concepts we used for the visual appeal was changing the background and changing
the costumes of the original sprite.

Summary:
Overall we feel that we learned a lot from this project, prior to this project we
were completely new to coding and now we feel a little more comfortable doing it. We
learned that even the simplest games require a significant amount of coding. Would we
say we completed our task, yes we would say we did but there were some difficulties
along the way. The main problem we faced was the time. It took us a while to figure
about the code for the ball that we in a way ran out of time to do the rest of the game. To
solve the problem we turned our game from a tennis game to a dodgeball like game
where the player that gets
hit the lowest amount of
times wins. We would say
that we worked well as a
team but could have
communicated better and
in a way used our time a
little more effectively. If
we had to do this project
again we would hopefully
be able to complete our
original task of creating a
tennis game.