Page 62 - Learn To Program With Scratch

The apples are falling from
the trees.

Using the arrow keys, move
the Cart sprite to collect the
apples before they reach the
ground.

Figure 2-21: The Catching Apples game

At first, you might think such a game requires many sprites with nearly
identical scripts. After all, there are a lot of apples. As of Scratch 2, however,
that’s not the case. With the cloning feature, you can easily create a bunch
of copies of a sprite. In our Catching Apples game, we’ll use a single apple
sprite and create as many clones as we desire.
Open the file CatchApples_NoCode.sb2, which contains the setup for our
game without scripts. To make things a little more exciting, the setup also
includes a variable named score (created for you in the Data palette), which
we’ll use to keep track of the caught apples. First, however, you’ll make the
script for the Cart sprite as illustrated in Figure 2-22.

Costume
center
Move to the bottom center of
the Stage.
If the right arrow is pressed,
move the cart 30 steps to the
right.

If the left arrow is pressed, move
the cart 30 steps to the left.

Figure 2-22: The script for the Cart sprite

When the green flag is clicked, we move the cart to the bottom center
of the Stage. The script then continuously checks the state of the right and
left arrows and moves the cart accordingly. I picked the number 30 based on
trial and error, so feel free to change it based on your own experimentation.
Now comes the cloning business. Start by adding the script of Fig-
ure 2-23 to the Apple sprite. This script also starts running when the green
flag is clicked.

40 Chapter 2
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