GrowBall in 95 Blocks - Click the Flag to Start a Game The Blue Ball goes wherever the Mouse goes. Collect Pink Balls to Grow and Score Points ... before a flying Ninja Blade hits you & it's game over! BUT the bigger you get the harder they are to avoid. Probably best played in full-screen mode. To meet @Duezz's 100 Block challenge, I had to remove the Leaderboard (& its 319 Bocks) as a 1st step. I managed to get it down to 137 Blocks initially. Then I had to remove my score stamping Sprite (18 Blocks) and replace it with displaying the Score variable (0 Blocks). It took a bit of creativity, but I eventually managed to get it down to 95 Blocks, without destroying the essential playability of the original game. Hope you like it.
Created as severely cut down version of my GrowBall project - https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/377964678/ - specifically for @Deuzz's "GAMES - 100 Blocks MAX" Studio and challenge to make a working game with no more than 100 Scratch Code Blocks in it. As far as the original full version of GrowBall is concerned: Thanks to @KU-James, for the original project. He made it years ago. It was his 1st Scratch Project. Pretty good for a 1st project & a great idea for a fun game. I just tidied it up a little, got rid of quite a few unnecessary Forever loops, made the Ninja-Blades spin and also made sure you at least got a chance to see a Ninja Blade before it hit you, giving you a chance to evade it. HOW TO GET HIGH SCORES IN GROWBALL The few who've had a serious attempt at playing GrowBall, can't comprehend how I manage to achieve such high scores on a regular basis, so I am going to tell you how, here. It may not look like it, but it's a Game of Strategy, a bit like Chess. There are different phases of the Game & each Phase requires a different Strategy. There is ONE RULE that applies to all phases of the GAME and it is the most important of all. MAIN RULE (All Phases) Never, ever, take your eye off the Main (Blue) Ball. You must pick up the presence of (Pink) Balls and Ninja Blades with your peripheral vision. So now to the 4 phases of the Game: START GAME Go hard! Chase any (Pink) Ball you see. You will get zapped early a few times (like < 5 moves), but you'll very quickly get your score up to about 15-20. MIDDLE GAME Slow down. Reduce sudden movements (or you will crash yourself into a Ninja Blade that would have missed you if you'd stayed where you were). Don't chase far away (Pink) Balls. Only go for the close ones. Far away ones have too much risk of a new Ninja Blade appearing between where you are and where the (Pink) Ball you're chasing is. You should be able to get your score up to around 30-40 this way. END GAME Your Main (Blue) Ball is getting too big now & with multiple Ninja Blades on screen heading for you it becomes almost impossible to avoid one without crashing into another. If you stick with the Middle Game strategy you'll be lucky to score more than 50. In the End Game strategy. You can make the exposed area of the (Main Ball) half its size by sitting on the Edge, and you can make the exposed area a quarter of its actual size by parking in a corner. You must concentrate very much more on avoiding Ninja Blades than catching (Pink) Balls. They will keep coming, you just have to be patient. I have not yet reached a conclusion about whether it is better to park in corners or mid-edge most of the time. A corner gives you the advantage of only being a quarter of your actual size, but you only have 2 escape routes and if two Ninja Blades are coming at you from different directions there is no escape. On the other hand parking mostly mid-edge gives you a 3rd escape route towards the middle, but you have twice as much of the Main Ball exposed. I got my score of 150 parking mostly mid-edge. However if you hang around the centre all the time, you whole ball will be there full size, but you always have 4 escape routes, so it's all a bit of a trade off. ULTRA END GAME I hope this is not actually achievable, but if your get really lucky and can manage to get your score up to around 200 with the End Game Strategy, it is time to try to sneak the Main (Blue) Ball into the centre of the screen. If you manage to make it there, the Main Ball will actually physically stop growing at a score of about 206, and because of the rules in place about where the Ninja Blades are allowed to be before appearing, namely 10 pixels from the edge and 20 pixels from the (Blue) Ball, there is actually no room in the 4 corners for them to appear, so they are no longer generated. BUT the (Pink) Balls keep coming ... so you can at that point get as high a score as you like, it just depends how long you are prepared to sit in the centre and wait. But don't sit there forever or your Record will never actually be recorded, until a Ninja Blade gets you, so you'll then have to move into a corner again to allow Ninja Blades to generate again, and hit you, to have the Record created, until of course, someone else does it and is prepared to wait longer than you did. I managed to get it to 201 but still got zapped. ONE MORE GENERAL RULE In all phases of the game you can actually occasionally risk a sudden movement (best if only used for emergency escapes - rather than to catch extra Pink Balls). Ninja Blades are generated randomly only once every 1-2 seconds. So the instant you see a new Ninja Blade appear, you have one full second before another one can, so you can safely move quickly to another spot (eg. corner to mid-edge or vice-versa or corner to corner), provided of course there are no Ninja Blades already on screen between you and where you are going (or about to be). GOOD LUCK!
