Page 41 - Learn To Program With Scratch

to the Ball sprite, either right before or after the if block in Figure 1-22. You’ll
find the touching color ? block in the Sensing palette and the stop block in
the Control palette.

Click the mouse on the color square. Then
click the light pink color area of the Stage.

This block is from the
Control palette.

Figure 1-23: The blocks for ending the game

When you click the mouse over the colored square inside the touching
color ? block, the cursor will change to a hand cursor. When you move that
cursor and click over the light pink rectangle at the bottom of the Stage,
the colored square inside the block should match the rectangle’s color. The
stop all block does exactly what its name says: It stops all running scripts in
all sprites, and the Paddle and the Ball sprites are no exception.
This basic pong game is now fully functional. Click the green flag and
play it a couple of times to test it out. After seeing that you can create a
whole game with such a small amount of code, I hope you agree with me
that Scratch is amazing!

Step 4: Spice It Up with Sound
Of course, games are more fun when they have sound, so let’s add one final
touch to play a noise every time we hit the ball.
Double-click the ball on the Stage to select it and then select the Sounds
tab. Click the Choose sound from library button to add a sound to the Ball
sprite. In the dialog that appears, select the Effects category, choose the
pop sound, and click OK to add it to the Sounds tab. After that, go back to
the Scripts tab and insert a play sound block (from the Sound palette), as
shown in Figure 1-24.

This block is from the Sound palette.

Figure 1-24: Playing a sound when the ball touches the paddle

Test the game once more, and this time, you should hear a short “pop”
every time the ball touches the paddle.
Congratulations! Your game is now complete (unless, of course, you
want to add more features to it), and you just wrote your first Scratch pro-
gram. If you’d like to experiment some more, try duplicating the Ball sprite
to have two (or more) balls in your game and see how that changes the way
you play!

Getting Started 19

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