The end of a great summer of phenomenal Game Jams!
What a better way to start the day than to see what some of your talented young future software engineers, designers, game devs and artists have been up to! (They're a really talented bunch your lot!)
Arnav showed us all his hard work on the previous game jam with the theme of can't stop moving where we play as a toucan avigating through waves of ghostly apparitions!
Max has been modding this week's game up to be a crazy cool volcanic adventure where magma rains down from the skies and players will EXPLODE upon getting hit! (Don't forget to turn your volume down as we went HARD on the explosion sound effects!)
Ainjel did some wonderful work modding his face into the game and getting a good chunk of code completed for his victory screen.
Owen delighted us as he showed us his spectacular work on a snake inspired title of his own creation.
And let's not forget Haris who switched up the game's formula somewhat this week so rather than avoiding the raindrops our player must instead avoid the ever increasing enemies and aerial attackers!
We've had all kinds of cool hacks today in Storm Survival!
Mira gave their bug a cool looking umbrella and designed a unique mechanic called "Protector of the Skies" that helps to shelter our little friend from the storm!
Alex worked on his variables, creating a system to give our bug pal more lives and therefore more chances to avoid the bad weather! Stanley wrote code to give the player a big hat to avoid the rain! I like the choice of sprite here! Val added custom art and some different text depending on whether the player wins or loses the game!
It's amazing seeing these ideas come to life
Have a lovely weekend!
Ant & Calum
About our game jams
A game jam is a themed build: we announce a theme, and children across the Academy spend a few weeks making something from it. There is no brief beyond the theme and nothing to finish by a deadline you can fail. Children share what they made on our own platform, where chat and sharing between members is moderated by mentors.
Jams are included in Academy membership. They are the part of the Academy where everybody is working on the same thing at once, which for a self-paced course is worth having.
The blog is in two halves. Guides are the evergreen explainers written by the mentors who teach the clubs, covering the questions parents actually ask: what comes after Scratch, how to support a coding-mad child when you cannot code yourself, and what works for autistic and ADHD children.
Club news is the other half, and it is where posts like this one live: game jams, Minecraft builds and weekly roundups, written up by whoever ran the session. Neither is marketing. If you want to know what the work actually looks like before you sign up to anything, club news is the more honest read of the two.
