Healthy Slime

Inspiration

I was inspired by my household's recent diet change to pursue a project related to food. I was then inspired to pursue a catching game project because I would be able to demonstrate the idea of eating healthy food in a fun and new way (new as in this would be the first time I would be making a catching game and fun since it's a game). I also decided to create a catching game because I think it is important to emphasize the importance of eating healthy when you're young so the simplicity of the game makes it perfect for a more younger audience.

What it does

My project allows a player to control Slime (the character I made) to eat as much healthy food as possible in order to stay happy and healthy. Player's control Slime by pressing the left and right arrow keys. Slime gains points when they eat healthy food and lose a life when they eat unhealthy food, just like how with humans, the more healthy we eat the better it is for us and the more unhealthy we eat the worse it is for us. The game also has three levels of varying difficulty, the difficulty being based on how fast the food will fall during the game. Easy mode will have food move by -5 units, medium mode will have food move by -7.5 units, and hard mode will have food move by -10 units.

How we built it

I built this project using Scratch. This was mainly due to the Aesthetic category for judging in this hackathon. I am not to familiar with creating images with the programming languages I know so it made more sense for me to use a platform that could help me create the images I wanted for this project.

Challenges we ran into

Challenges I ran into were mainly when I was figuring out how to code the main components of the game, how to make Slime move side to side during the game, how to make the food continuously fall until the end of the game, and how Slime will "eat" the food. The key block for all these challenges was the forever block. Another challenge was having to update a lot of components whenever I made a change, though I guess it wasn't really challenging as it was tedious. My greatest challenge was having a player's final score displayed which presently is still unsatisfactory for me as it a player's final score is displayed but only briefly. It should also be noted that there is a small bug with one of the buttons in the game that I could not figure out how to fix.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Accomplishments I am proud of is creating a functioning catching game. This is the first time I have done such a thing so it was a great experience, both the good and bad. I am also proud of Slime, the slime character I created using Scratch's Sprite tools. Even though the creation of Slime doesn't really have anything to do with the actual code of the game it was still fun to create a character of my own instead of using one of the already made Sprite's.

What we learned

I learned how to make a functioning catching game. I also learned that I should really start practicing writing down my ideas/pseudocode as it would have helped me avoid a lot of the tedious changes I had to make and would have helped me possibly brainstorm more/better ideas.

What's next for Healthy Slime

I suppose trying to improve Healthy Slime is next. Maybe improving the aesthetic or adding more game mode options. Also improving the final score display and trying to fix that button bug.

Built With

• scratch