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Students parameterize other parts of their game, so that the experience changes as the score increases. This track delves deeper into conditionals and abstraction, offering students a chance to customize their games further while applying those concepts.

Product Outcomes

  • Students add a second level (with a different background image) to NinjaCat

  • test

Materials

🔗Adding Levels 45 minutes

Overview

This activity introduces a programming pattern to add levels to students' games. For now, the only thing a level does is change the background - but students can easily extend this to change other aspects of the game.

Launch

You can add depth to your game by adding levels. In this lesson, we’ll cover making new levels based on the game’s score. To start, we want our Ninja Cat game to have a different background image when the player progresses to the next level. We’ll say that the player reaches level two when his or her score is greater than 250.

  • Where do you define the BACKGROUND-IMG image in your game?

  • Keep your original background for the first level, but define a new variable BACKGROUND2-IMG, that will be used for level 2.

  • For the best results, use an image that is the same size as your original background.

Once you have your second background image, it should be drawn into the game  — but only when a certain condition is met. Think back to the helper function we wrote to change the color of the sunset animation in Build Your Own Animation.

We need to do the same thing here!

  • What must be true for the player to progress to level 2?

  • Write a function draw-bg, which consumes the score and produces the appropriate background image.

Now that we have our helper function, we can use it to draw of that one part of the animation. Instead of blindly putting BACKGROUND-IMG into our function, now we’ll use draw-bg(g.score):

fun draw-state(g):
  put-image(text(
  string-append("NinjaCat! Score: ", num-to-string(g.score)),
            20, "white"),
      310, 470,
      put-image(
      text("Use arrow keys to move. Jump on the dog & catch the ruby!",
            12, "white"),
        320, 450,
        put-image(PLAYER-IMG, g.playerx, g.playery,
          put-image(CLOUD-IMG, 150, 350,
            put-image(RUBY-IMG, g.targetx, g.targety,
              put-image(DOG-IMG, g.dangerx, g.dangery,
                draw-bg(g.score)))))))
  ...

Investigate

Now our Ninja Cat game has a level 2! You can add more conditions to draw-bg to have multiple levels. You can use this same technique in lots of ways:

  • Write draw-player and change draw-state so that have the Player transform if the score is above 250.

  • Change your animation functions so that your characters move faster if the score is above 250.

  • Add a special key (jumping? firing? warping?) that is only unlocked if the score is above 250.

These materials were developed partly through support of the National Science Foundation, (awards 1042210, 1535276, 1648684, 1738598, 2031479, and 1501927). CCbadge Bootstrap by the Bootstrap Community is licensed under a Creative Commons 4.0 Unported License. This license does not grant permission to run training or professional development. Offering training or professional development with materials substantially derived from Bootstrap must be approved in writing by a Bootstrap Director. Permissions beyond the scope of this license, such as to run training, may be available by contacting contact@BootstrapWorld.org.

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