We are back in Game Dev Club and this week our hackers are playing 'Colour Run'.
A fun brain teaser mixed with some hand-eye coordinator; the player has to get their coloured sphere through the obstacles by matching its colour with the corresponding one. If the sphere hits a different colour to its own, it's game-over and the player has to start all over again.
The player gains points the further they move along the screen and the more obstacles they manage to get through. So... it was only natural that even before we tackled the Guided Hack that we did a quick hack our own: A High Score Mechanic! By creating a variable called 'High Score' and using some comparison logic code to check whether the High Score was higher than the current Score, our hackers were able to keep track of their best score and have their own mini tournament of Colour Run
After having some competitive matches, we moved onto our Guided Hack which was another one of our favourite mechanics in video-games: power-ups. We created a new sprite which would active our power-up - this time, should the sphere manage to touch the power-up sprite, it would create a rainbow effect which would allow the sphere to pass through any colour rather than its associated one. This made our high score mini tournament even more fun, especially when we had members modifying the code to make the power-up sprite appear more frequently on the screen!
We also had a quick look at some of the Game Jam entries that our members have been working on - there is still a few days left to finish your entry and we can't wait to see what everyone comes up with for our Element Powers Game Jam! https://thecode.zone/dashboard/gamejam
Happy gaming and see you next week!
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.
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.
