Book Image

Scratch Cookbook

By : Brandon Milonovich
Book Image

Scratch Cookbook

By: Brandon Milonovich

Overview of this book

Scratch 2.0 is an easy to use programming language that allows you to animate stories and create interactive games. Scratch also gives you the capability of using programming to calculate complicated calculations for you. Scratch Cookbook will lead you through easy-to-follow recipes that give you everything you need to become a more advanced programmer. Scratch Cookbook will take you through the essential features of Scratch. You'll then work through simple recipes to gain an understanding of the more advanced features of Scratch. You will learn how to create animations using Scratch. Sensory board integration (getting input from the outside environment) will also be covered, along with using Scratch to solve complicated and tedious calculations for you. You'll also learn how to work through the exciting process of project remixing where you build on the work of others. Scratch Cookbook will give you everything you need to get started with building your own programs in Scratch that involve sounds, animations, and user interaction.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Scratch Cookbook
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Using the timer


A timer can be a very helpful tool in a game. You may want the game to only last a limited amount of time, or you may just want to know how long the game has gone on for. In this recipe we'll explore this functionality.

Getting ready

There are two important blocks we'll use to work with timing in Scratch, both of which are under the Sensing category.

The first of these resets our time back to 0. The second one allows us to place the time somewhere to be used, and also displays the time elapsed. Check the box next to the timer block so that we can see the time running on our stage.

Note

Notice that the time is kept in seconds, and does not count down. We'll figure out a few workarounds for this in Chapter 5, Spicing up Games.

We'll now have our game record the last time it took the user to hit the target. This will be stored as a new variable.

How to do it...

First, we'll need to create our variable that will handle storing the data.

To create the variable, perform the following steps...