Welcome to a fun Scratch tutorial for kids! In this article, we’ll show you how to make a maze in Scratch. We’ll start from the beginning and demonstrate how to create your own maze, control the character’s escape from the maze with arrow keys, and even customize the maze with different themes. Let's get started!
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Learn how to make a maze in Scratch
Check out the maze game we’re building here! Follow the steps below to see how to do this with Scratch coding. Or watch our helpful video to hear instructions.
1. Set up the maze and character
The first thing to do is create the maze. New Scratch projects come loaded with a default blank white backdrop. Click on the backdrop in the bottom right, which will put you in an edit backdrop mode. Then in the top left horizontal menu, click on “Backdrops”.
Use the line drawing feature (fourth one down in the left column) to create whatever maze pattern you want. Then use the brush feature (second one down in the left column), and draw a green arrow at the exit point of the maze. This is important as it will let us detect when the player has solved the maze and display a win message.
Then click on the sprite to get back to sprite editing mode. I’m using the cat, but feel free to use whatever you want! We want to make sure our cat is small enough to travel through the maze. Set the “Size” feature in the lower right panel to 20.
Then drag the cat to the top left corner of the map as the starting location. Pay attention to the x and y values of the location. In our example, x is -180 and y is 120. This information allows us to always move the cat to the top left location every time we start the game.
2. Write the code for the start of the game
Now it’s time to code! Make sure you have clicked the sprite so we are adding code only for the character.
The first block we want is “when green flag clicked” from Events. Underneath, we want the “go to x, y” Motion block. We can fill in the blanks with the values for the top left position. For us, x is -180 and 120. This allows us to reset the game every time we hit the green flag.
3. Write the code to control the character with arrow keys
Most of our code will allow us to control the cat with our arrow keys. In Events, we want the “when space key pressed” block, and we need to change “space” to “right arrow” from the drop down.
We want to connect this to the “change x by 10” Motion block. This will allow us to move to the right every time we press the right arrow. We also need to handle the case if the cat walks into the wall, and we want to stop any motion.
To do this, we want to add the if/then block from Control. The if condition is the “touching color” block from Sensing. The color will be the color of the line. Scratch has a really cool feature to get the exact color of the line. When you click the color circle in the sensing block to change it, you will see that you can change the color with three sliders.
But to ensure the color is a perfect match with the colors of the maze, you can click the symbol that looks like a background with a dropper on top of it. This will now open us a view where you can hover over parts of the background and select a color. In this hover view, click on a line on the edge of the maze, and this will get the maze color for you.
When we touch the edge of the maze, we want to undo the motion we just did. To do this, we want a “change x” Motion block inside the if statement, but we want to change the number to -10.
When we hit the left arrow, we want a similar horizontal movement to happen, but in the leftward direction. Since this code will look similar to the right movement, we can click on the “when right arrow clicked” block and select “duplicate”.
The only changes we need to make in this duplicated block are to change 10 to -10 and change -10 to 10 (this reverses the motion). We also want to switch “right arrow” to “left arrow”.
Now we need to handle vertical movement. From Events get the “when space key pressed” block and change the key to “up arrow”. Since this is vertical movement, we want to add the “change y by 10” Motion block.
Like before, we need an if/then block. The condition remains the same as before: we need a Sensing block of touching color and we can use the same trick to get the exact color of the maze lines. Inside this if block, we need to undo the upwards motion, and we can do that by putting a “change y” Motion block inside while making sure the number is -10.
We can duplicate this code for down arrow movement through right clicking the “when up arrow key pressed” block and selecting duplicate. Then we need to make the following small changes: switch “up arrow” to “down arrow”, change 10 to -10, and change -10 to 10. This reverses the motion, which is expected given that up motion and down motion are opposites of each other.
4. Display a win message once the character escapes
We’re almost done. The last thing we need to take care of is displaying a win message.
To do this, let’s make a new backdrop that represents the win screen. Go to the round “backdrop add” button in the very bottom right corner of the screen. Hover over this button, and select the “paint” icon that is third from the top. Then go to the backdrop editor, and on this blank screen, type a win message like “Yay you win!!”. The text editor is third down in the second column.
Now we need to update our code to change backdrops at the correct time. After the “go to x, y” block that we already have under the “when green flag clicked”, we want to add the two Looks blocks of “show” and “switch backdrop to backdrop1”. The “switch backdrop” block has a drop down menu so make sure backdrop1 (or the name of your backdrop that contains the maze) is selected. This allows us to reset to the maze whenever we start the game after switching to the win screen.
After this, we need to add a “forever” block from Control since we always want to detect if we have reached the green arrow, signaling the end of the game. Inside “forever”, we want an “if/then” structure similar to the one we built for detecting if the character walked into a wall.
We can use the Sensing “touching color” block to detect when we have reached the arrow and solved the maze. This time, change the color in this sensing block to the color of the arrow using the same hover technique we used to get the color of the maze.
Inside the “if/then” block, we want two Looks blocks. We first want “switch backdrop to backdrop2”, and make sure to change the backdrop to the one with your win message. We also want the “hide” block to make the character disappear from the screen so we only have a win screen. Great job! You have just built a maze in Scratch!
5. Customize the maze!
You can also create mazes with themes! We drew our maze on the default white background, but you can first load in one of Scratch’s backgrounds, and then draw the maze on top of it. Then you can pick a character that matches your theme. For example, you might make a crab under the sea or a monkey in the jungle.
Have fun making a maze in Scratch
We hope you had fun making your maze game! In this article, you learned how to build a maze and helped a cat escape from it. Check out our Scratch coding classes to learn how to make other games and animations. Up next, learn how to make a Pacman game in Scratch with a simple tutorial.
Written by Sophie Andrews, a Create & Learn instructor. Sophie Andrews is a student at Stanford University studying Math and Computational Sciences. She loves teaching and is a teaching assistant for Stanford's introductory computer science classes. Her work focuses on data science. Last year she built the online National Vote Trackers for The Cook Political Report, and she currently leads the Data Team at The Stanford Daily. She's also interned with the FCC and the National Renewable Energy Lab.
