5.05 Space-hippos
Now you’re going to add lots of flying hippos that try to destroy your spaceship.
Create a new sprite with the ‘Hippo1’ image in the Scratch library. Use the shrink tool to make the Hippo sprite a similar size to the Spaceship sprite.
Set the Hippo
You can set which way a sprite rotates.
- Click on the sprite in the Sprites panel.
- Click on the direction and select the rotation style you want.
The styles are:
- All around — points the sprite in the direction it is facing
- Left/Right — flips the sprite left or right only
- Do not rotate — the sprite looks the same regardless of which direction it is facing
Add some code to hide the Hippo
Add some code to the Stage to create a new Hippo
Each new hippo clone should appear at a random x position, and every clone should have a random speed.
Create a new variable called speed that is for the Hippo
- Click on Variables in the Code tab, then click on Make a Variable.
- Type in the name of your variable. You can choose whether you would like your variable to be available to all sprites, or to only this sprite. Press OK.
- Once you have created the variable, it will be displayed on the Stage, or you can untick the variable in the Scripts tab to hide it.
When you’ve done this correctly, the variable has the name of the sprite next to it, like this:
When each Hippo
Test your code. Does a new hippo appear every few seconds?
At the moment the hippos don’t move.
Each hippo should move around randomly until it gets hit by a lightning bolt. To make that happen, attach this code below the blocks that are already in the Hippo
Test your code again. You should see a new hippo clone appear every few seconds, and each clone should move at a different speed.
Now test the spaceship’s laser cannon. If a lightning bolt hits a hippo, does the hippo vanish?