Updated: 7/17/2014
An extensible, build-from-scratch, game programming activity in StarLogo Nova
This activity is designed for users with some experience working with and extending StarLogo Nova projects and would like to learn how to build a new project from start to finish. Rather than present step-by-step instructions, it contains a series of small challenges paired with some commands that are useful for completing the challenges.
The result of completing the challenges is a fully functional, extensible treasure hunt game.
Goals
 Create a treasure hunt game in StarLogo Nova
 Learn to start a project from scratch
 Explore new commands without fear of breaking something
 Learn essential concepts that apply to every StarLogo Nova game.
Instructions
Read each challenge and examine any commands or features that are given to help complete the challenge. Then try to complete the challenge in any way you want to. Do not be afraid to explore and make mistakes! Use any commands or features you want to use, but if you are stuck make sure to look at what is supplied with the challenge. Feel free to ask your neighbors for help, but always make sure to make your own mistakes first.
Challenges 1-5 will lead to a basic, but fully functional game . Challenges 6-10 extend the basic game and teach the use of more blocks. There are programming tips scattered throughout the activity sheets. If you do not have time to complete the remaining challenges, you may still want to read the programming tips, which are relevant when you are programming any StarLogo Nova project, not just for this activity.
Game Description
The player controls an agent by using keyboard arrow keys to collect as many treasure agents as possible while avoiding obstacles.
IMPORTANT NOTE: There are blocks provided with every challenge. These blocks are only suggestions to complete the challenge. IT IS NOT NECESSARY TO USE ALL THE BLOCKS PROVIDED.
By: MIT Scheller Teacher Education Program. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License , which allows anyone to re-distribute, re-use, and modify, on the condition that the creator is appropriately credited.
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Treasure Hunt Game Programming Activity - Updated: 7/17/2014
 Create a player breed, treasures breed, and obstacles breed.
 Create 1 player agent, many treasures, and some obstacles. Scatter some or all of your agents.
Useful features/commands:
Drawer
Interface
Agents
Blocks
: Scroll up to the SpaceLand to use Edit Breed.
What the agent does:
Executes commands inside this block (once, from top to bottom) when the push button widget is pushed. Widgets can be created using the Edit
Widgets feature.
Deletes everyone including itself. *The World cannot delete itself.
Agents
Creates the specified number of agents of the chosen breed.
The 2nd block adds the feature where each newly created agent immediately follows the directions the block makes them "do".
Traits
"set my ___ to ___": Sets its trait to some value.
The trait is chosen from the drop down menu and includes color, shape, size, etc.
“color: ____”: Represents a specific color or a color at random chosen from the drop down menu..
Agents Sets its location to a random position in
SpaceLand.
Agents
Sets all the agents' locations to random positions in SpaceLand.
Test your setup code by clicking “Run Code”, then the setup button in SpaceLand to see if setup is working as you intended.
By: MIT Scheller Teacher Education Program. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License , which allows anyone to re-distribute, re-use, and modify, on the condition that the creator is appropriately credited.
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Treasure Hunt Game Programming Activity - Updated: 7/17/2014
st
To start the game in 1 st person perspective of the player agent, program the player to take camera when the player agent is created.
Useful features/commands:
Drawer Block What the agent does:
Agents
Enables perspective of over-agent’s-shoulder view; i.e., the camera follows the agent around.
Reset Camera brings the view back to default.
Agent View follows the agent who has taken the camera as it moves around.
Sample Code:
Test your setup code by clicking “Run code”, then the setup button in the SpaceLand window. You should be looking over the shoulder of your player agent.
By: MIT Scheller Teacher Education Program. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License , which allows anyone to re-distribute, re-use, and modify, on the condition that the creator is appropriately credited.
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Treasure Hunt Game Programming Activity - Updated: 7/17/2014
Procedures are useful when you want to use a set of instructions multiple times or when you want to break down a complicated task into discrete parts and program each part separately in an easy-to-read way.
There are two important parts to using procedures:
 Defining a procedure: adding instructions to the procedure block. It is good programming practice to give the procedure a name that describes the set of instructions.
 Calling a procedure: using the procedure after it has been defined (for example, in a while forever toggled block).
Define a procedure in StarLogo Nova by dragging a “Procedure” block from the Procedure drawer to the
Workspace on the Player’s page.
Double click on the Procedure name and change it to Keyboard Controls.
Under the Procedure block, attach the following blocks:
These blocks read: Agent tests to see if the up arrow key is held down. If so, go forward 1 step.
Program additional blocks to do the following:
 Down arrow = Back 1
 Left arrow = Turn left 5 degrees
 Right arrow = Turn right 5 degrees
You may want to use cut and paste, and drop menus on blocks.
To call a procedure means to program a breed of agents to follow the procedure. You want the player agent to follow the Keyboard Controls procedure so you will call the procedure in the “While forever toggled” block in the “Player’s” page. (see next challenge)
Example: Drag a box around the chunk of blocks you want to copy. It’s fine if the box outline overlaps with other blocks but only whole blocks within the outline will be copied. Use drop down menus to change blocks to the desired arrow key.
By: MIT Scheller Teacher Education Program. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License , which allows anyone to re-distribute, re-use, and modify, on the condition that the creator is appropriately credited.
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Treasure Hunt Game Programming Activity - Updated: 7/17/2014
Recall that the “While forever toggled” block runs instructions from top to bottom in a loop while the “forever” button is toggled on.
Program the following:
 Have the player agent call the Keyboard Controls procedure.
It will look like this:
 Test your code before continuing.
Useful features/commands:
Drawer Block
Interface
Procedures
What the agent does:
Executes commands (in a forever loop) when the toggle button widget is turned on. When the toggle button widget is turned off, the commands in this block don’t run. Widgets can be created using the
Edit Widgets feature.
Agent calls a defined procedure to follow from the drop down menu.
By: MIT Scheller Teacher Education Program. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License , which allows anyone to re-distribute, re-use, and modify, on the condition that the creator is appropriately credited.
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Treasure Hunt Game Programming Activity - Updated: 7/17/2014
Use Collision blocks to program what happens when agents collide with each other. Remember that the basic idea of the treasure game is for the player agent to collect treasure and avoid obstacles.
Program the following:
 Treasure page: On collision with player, treasure agent increases score by 1. Treasure deletes itself. Use the score data box widget to change and display the score, like this:
 Player page: On collision with obstacle, player deletes itself
 Initialize (set) score to 0 in the existing setup block.
 To make the game harder or easier, adjust the numbers of starting obstacles and treasures
 Test your code before continuing.
Useful features/commands:
Drawer Block What the agent does:
Tells the "owner" of the block what to do when it bumps into an agent of the chosen breed. The “owner” is an agent of the breed whose page is where this collision block is put.
Deletes itself.
Deletes the specified agent (use
"collidee", "nearest", or "my parent" blocks).
Refers to the agent currently colliding with the "owner" of the block. (Only works inside an on collision with block)
Assigns a value to a data box.
By: MIT Scheller Teacher Education Program. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License , which allows anyone to re-distribute, re-use, and modify, on the condition that the creator is appropriately credited.
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Treasure Hunt Game Programming Activity - Updated: 7/17/2014
Returns the value of the data box.
Tells me the value of the computed expression.
By: MIT Scheller Teacher Education Program. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License , which allows anyone to re-distribute, re-use, and modify, on the condition that the creator is appropriately credited.
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Treasure Hunt Game Programming Activity - Updated: 7/17/2014
Instead of the Player agent dying immediately when it collides with an obstacle, you can program a “lives” (or
“health”) data box for the player agent that decreases every time the player agent collides with obstacles. When lives get to zero, the player dies. One way to program this is to use a data box widget.
1.
Create a data-box widget called “lives” or “health” (no quotes).
2.
Initialize (set) the lives data box to a starting value of your choice in the when setup pushed block. For example, starting number of lives given could be 4, 5 or 10.
Set the lives data box to decrease every time player collides with an obstacle. (Hint: Similar to the above Score
data box.) Also program the obstacle to delete so you do not get multiple collisions.
3.
Player breed checks if its lives data box is ≤ to 0. If true, then player dies.
4.
Test your code before continuing.
Useful features/commands:
Drawer Block What the agent does:
Logic
Test for something. If true, then the agent follows the commands in the hook.
Logic
Interface
Determines if the first input is less than or equal to the second input and returns true or false
Returns the value of the data box.
Interface
Math
Assigns a value to a data box.
Returns the difference of two inputs
By: MIT Scheller Teacher Education Program. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License , which allows anyone to re-distribute, re-use, and modify, on the condition that the creator is appropriately credited.
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Treasure Hunt Game Programming Activity - Updated: 7/17/2014
Agents come with a number of built-in traits that you can adjust. Click the drop down menu to see the available built-in traits.
Explore and try adjusting the traits of your agents in the Create-Do blocks.
Sample code:
By: MIT Scheller Teacher Education Program. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License , which allows anyone to re-distribute, re-use, and modify, on the condition that the creator is appropriately credited.
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Treasure Hunt Game Programming Activity - Updated: 7/17/2014
Try programming some of these features or think of other things you can do to make your game more interesting!
 Make different color treasure worth different number of points. You may want to create batches of treasure with particular colors in the existing Setup block. o Hint: Use “Create-Do” blocks to control the traits
 Program an ending for the game if the player wins (passes some threshold for score) or dies. o Hint: Use the “toggle forever off for everyone” block to program the Player agent to turn off the forever button when either of these conditions are met. o Hint: Create a new data box widget to display a message like You Win! or Try again! OR play a recorded sound to do this.
By: MIT Scheller Teacher Education Program. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License , which allows anyone to re-distribute, re-use, and modify, on the condition that the creator is appropriately credited.
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Treasure Hunt Game Programming Activity - Updated: 7/17/2014
To increase the excitement level of your game, add rival agents who can also collect treasure, thus reducing the number available for the player.
1.
Add the rival breed.
2.
Create one or more rival agents.
3.
Program the rival agents to move by creating a procedure. Start with something simple at first, like forward 1.
4.
Program the collision between rival agents and treasures so that the treasures delete
Improvements:
 Try different movement instructions to see which will allow the rival agent(s) to cover more ground.
 Adjust the number of rival agents until you achieve the right level of challenge.
 Try adding randomness to your movement instructions.
Useful features/commands:
Drawer Block What the agent does:
Movement
Moves forward with a set number of steps per tick
Movement
Moves backward with a set number of steps per tick
Movement
Movement
Turns left with a set number of degrees during each tick
Turns right with a set number of degrees during each tick
Math
Returns a random number between 1 and the specified number. Generates a new random number each time.
By: MIT Scheller Teacher Education Program. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License , which allows anyone to re-distribute, re-use, and modify, on the condition that the creator is appropriately credited.
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Treasure Hunt Game Programming Activity - Updated: 7/17/2014
Program the rival agents keep their own score so that the player’s goal is to beat the rival agents’ score. This involves creating a data box widget that functions like score.
1.
Create a new data box widget and rename it to something like “rival score” (no quotes).
2.
Initialize (set) it to 0 in the existing setup block.
3.
Update the value when it increases in the appropriate collision block.
Useful features/commands:
Drawer Block What the agent does:
Any agent can modify data box widget.
Can be renamed to a more meaningful name that describes its function.
In this case, it should be called “Rival
Score”
Test for something. If true, then the agent follows the commands in the hook.
Logic
Interface
Assigns a value to a data box.
For example, to increase the rival’s score, set the rival’s score text to rival’s score data+1
By: MIT Scheller Teacher Education Program. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License , which allows anyone to re-distribute, re-use, and modify, on the condition that the creator is appropriately credited.
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