Why We Love Art in Video Games!
While coding is important when it comes to making games, art is just as crucial for bringing an idea to life! Keep reading to find out more about how we encourage our members to create their own art as they learn to code...
Since the dawn of time (well, depending on who you ask, since around 1952) video games have had art and graphics to display all kinds of things, from players, to enemies, to backgrounds! They’re such an important part of the process of experiencing games it’s literally half of their name.
While we mostly refer to our clubs as “coding clubs,” they’re often actually more game design clubs focusing more on the whole game making process. Part of the process of making games is the designing of graphics, something we love to encourage our members to do!
How We Use Art In Club
Building Computer Literacy
This has multiple benefits for all of our members, for our younger members it’s a chance to improve their mouse skills to further build on computer literacy!
For our older members that maybe are thinking about becoming game developers or designers it gives a chance to learn a little bit more about the game making process and things that are needed to make a finished game!
Using Art To Develop Ideas
We love encouraging our members to play around with editing graphics as it can be a great way of getting ideas flowing!
For example, let's say you have a game with a plane in it, if you change that game into a glider maybe it gives you the idea to try making a mechanic where you need to find updrafts to keep yourself in the air!
Overall we think that the graphical side of game making is super cool, and we encourage everyone else to think the same!
Is your child ready to flex their creative muscles? Let them give game designing a go with a FREE taster session in one of our clubs!
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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