Fly Catch

Our second worked example will look at how we can use control flow with SplashKit to create a small game where the user controls a spider on its web.

Name	Fly Catch
Description	A small game where the user controls a spider using the keys on the keyboard. The user can move the spider around on their web, catching each fly as it appears. Take too long, and the fly escapes.

Understanding the Fly Catch Game

Hopefully the short description of the game has given you a sufficient idea what it is. Thinking through this we can start to come up with ideas for how this can be created in our code.

• The player will be a spider.
  • We need an image or shape to represent this.
  • It will need a location on the screen (x and y).
  • The location can change.
  • User input can change the spider location using arrow keys.
  • We need to be able to check when the spider gets the fly.
• There will be a fly.
  • It may not be on the web yet (not drawn).
  • It will need an image or a shape.
  • It will have a location.
  • We set the location. It will stay there until caught, or it escapes.
  • We can use a random time to determine when it escapes.
  • We can then use another random time to determine when it appears again.

Computational Thinking

Remember that you must come up with a structure that you can code into the computer using the things you have seen so far: variables, constants, method calls, assignment statements, and control flow. This is central to computational thinking.

Think through how you could achieve this — what data do we need? How could the different steps be realised?