I have been so impressed over the last few months at the standard of work coming out of the various clubs and courses I run, I’ve always wanted to give the students further direction with regards to their creativity and coding. So I hit the ground running this year and after a great deal of hard work have produced this 24 page booklet on game design and distribution.
I used to make zines all time years ago and could see the layout of the booklets in my mind easily. It appears I’ve lost that skill these days but I managed to nail it with help from an old zine-making friend. Thank you!
Here are a couple of winners from the Christmas Python coding competition I ran this month in one of the schools here in Salisbury. Each pupil had a couple of sessions with me as we covered the basics and got them building a basic personal assistant bot. They were then encouraged to run with the project in their own time which they did in their own brilliant way. With over 60 pupils signing up, judging was a really difficult task. Below are a couple of winners, just hit the play button to run the code and have a play.
A great Choose Your Own Adventure game:
A tricky Complete The Star Wars Quote game:
This week saw the launch of another computer club at Leehurst Swan school. This half term focuses on game making, paying close attention to character animation, level design and scoring systems with the aim of providing pupils with enough knowledge to make their own games over Christmas.
As our game designing courses progress, there have been a number of really good points that have emerged from discussions and the projects we’re making.
The most important one so far has been to concentrate on what you’re good at when it comes to game design. If you’re more of an artist than a coder then focus on the art, there is a huge resource out there to help with the coding side of things. Likewise, if you’re a good coder but poor at art then why not consider purchasing some assets. This is we’ve done in this case and the best thing is, we’ve found a character that almost matches exactly our concept drawing!
As our game is going to be a vertical scrolling ninja game, we’ve been working on a suitable name for it all weekend and we’ve hit upon “Night Fall”.