Ant's Weekly Round-Up 10th April
Hold the Fort had some amazing creativity involved!
Hi All!
Ant here once again to tell you about the hacks and what your young coders have been up to this week!
This week we’ve been working on what has probably been my favourite game so far, Hold the Fort. An excellent defence game (with some nifty physics) where players had to use their cannon to shoot an onslaught of dragons out of the sky.
New coder Taylor took this week’s game and switched things up by altering the theme (quite suitably for Easter if I do say so myself) to an egg smashing eggstravaganza. Cracking work Taylor!
Finding the game a little easy, Natalie created her own boss fight which kicks off once the player has survived long enough to prove themselves against the mega-dragon. I haven’t beaten it quite yet Natalie, but next time it’s going down!
We also can’t forget Jaikrish this week who wanted to up the ante (and the chaos!) by doubling our cannons and dramatically increasing the number of dragons to the point where ‘onslaught’ is just too soft a word.
I believe the phrase “Bring on the wall!” briefly popped through my head before the overwhelming force of Dragonfire burned my fortress to the ground. Nicely done Jaikrish.
Moving onwards, our coders better fasten their seatbelts as next week we blast off into the unknown in ‘The Asteroid Field’! In this space adventure, the player must navigate through a barrage of asteroids and into a wormhole where they’ll find safety… or perhaps many many more asteroids! Engage those problem-solving brains and start thinking of what you’d like to build in your own space games next week!
As always, if you have any hack ideas you need a bit of help with or if you’re ever stuck don’t forget to message us using that big blue button in the bottom right corner of your screen!
Have a wonderful weekend everyone!
Ant
About The Code Zone Academy
Posts like this one are written by the mentors, about what members have been building. The Game Dev Academy has no fixed session time: a new build goes up every week and a child opens it whenever they are ready, with a STEM-certified mentor answering by text and video message when they get stuck.
Children build their own games rather than following a set course, starting in Scratch. Levels move down as readily as up, and staying where you are is a perfectly good outcome. Every mentor is background-checked and STEM-certified.
More like this
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.
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