This game is a nightmare of randomness. Use the left and right arrows to move the cat. How far will it move with each key press? Who knows! You have to catch the falling fruit. How fast does it fall? IDK! How many points do you get for catching a fruit? It's a mystery! How many points do you lose if you miss a fruit? Could be anything! There's a time limit, but I don't know what it is. Just try to have a positive score when the time is up.
My main success today was finding a use for a project that didn't come off as hoped the first time. My frustration with this project is based on the struggles I had with it on Day 5. This project started out as my Day 5 project with the "touching color..." blocks. I did not think I would find a use for it so soon, but I am glad I saved it. For day 5, color sensing, I had the polar bear catching fruit. The idea was to have the bear change color according to the fruit it caught. I discovered that because the polar bear is white, the "set color effect to..." block has almost no effect on the bear. The mildly pastel polar bear was not very visually striking. So it got saved for later. Later ended up being today. In a game we rely on certain things being constant. Our character moves a certain speed. The objects we are trying to collect or avoid move at set speeds. Contact with these objects are worth or cost known numbers of points. Even if these things change throughout the game, they tend to do so at a predictable rate. For today's prompt, I used random blocks everywhere I could think of. The sprites move at random speeds. They caught or missed fruit is worth (or costs) a random amount of points. The timer starts at a random amount of "time" and subtracts random amounts of "time" at random intervals. I played for a while and decided the best goal to set is simply to have a positive score when the time is up. (p.s. Your starting score may be more or less than zero at the beginning. Randomly determined, of course.) Usually I make projects with most of my attention focused on how they can be used with my students. Every year I do cardboard arcade with my 3rd graders. That unit is introduced with a discussion about what makes an activity a game. This is to get them thinking about things like fairness, fun, amount of challenge, etc. I am thinking about this project as an introduction to game design for my 4th or 5th graders. They would play the game and then reflect on what is good and bad about it. I would probably create a couple more example games for they to play and reflect on before beginning the planning process for their own games. Basic catch game directions can be found here: https://resources.scratch.mit.edu/source/cards-old-scratch2/InDesign-files/catch/Catch%20Game%20-%20Scratch%20Cards%20Files.pdf
