Coding For Kids For Dummies

Project 15

Traffic Dodge

What’s a desert frog to do when faced with racing cars, speeding motorcycles, and oh-so-slow camels? That’s what your player must contend with while crossing busy highways in Traffic Dodge!

In this project, you build your own Frogger-style game that includes levels. You build game pages — both Level 1 and Level 2. These are the pages where the player plays the game. Then you create a splash page — a page that introduces your game and gives a backstory.

The player controls the frog by using keyboard controls. If the jumping frog and a vehicle collide, the hit is announced, and the frog shape changes to appear squished. Also, the game has a variable that indicates lives remaining — each hit subtracts one life, and when the player runs out of lives, the game is over. Get jumping!

In the classic version of Frogger, game play is more complicated: You must first dodge traffic, and then jump onto lily pads to avoid drowning in the raging river. Here, you need only worry about programming a game in which the frog must avoid getting squished by vehicles and other moving objects.

Brainstorm

Don’t feel limited to jumping a frog through obstacles. You can choose any "mark" to move through any obstacle:

• An iPod-wearing vocalist being bombarded with music notes as he attempts to reach his recording session unscathed
• A germ-evading, white-blood-cell trooper as it moves ...