Ant here again from the Code Zone to give you all a quick catch up on our festive antics last week in our Game Dev Clubs.
Ant here again from the Code Zone to give you all a quick catch up on our festive antics last week in our Game Dev Clubs.
With one week to go before the big Christmas break we’ve been fully embracing the christmas tree decorating, Santa’s sleigh jingling madness of the season and have put out two Christmas themed projects for all to work on.
First off we had the latest featured game ‘Santa’s Coming to Town!’ An infinite runner where players must control Santa’s sleigh dashing over rooftops and avoiding dangerous doves diving in from the right, and secondly we have the latest in our series of Game Jams!
For our latest featured game, any who partook in the guided hack have added a system where Santa can now drop presents and must aim for the passing chimneys below, the more successfully delivered presents, the higher the score!
As for our termly Game Jam, this big festive wrap up comes with the theme of ‘Christmas is Cancelled!’, a term which has been met with audible gasps in most of my clubs.
I’ve heard all sorts of ideas over the last few days for this, our latest, grand game making event. Ideas ranging from pelting Santa out the sky (believe it or not this has been the single most popular suggestion), stealing presents from the North Pole, and even creating a Grinch simulator!
I don’t know about you but I’m rather excited to see how a ‘Grinch Simulator’ turns out.
I would also like to send a big big well done out there to Arlo who’s making solid progress on his own Grinch-based platforming gamejam project, Stewart who’s been truly committed to his ‘Meh-rio Brothers' project (and has even started dabbling in the ‘story extension’ to create an intro cutscene), and William who turned this week’s featured game into an onslaught of chickens, chickens and more chickens (it makes more sense when you see it).
Best of luck in the Game Jam all and don’t forget to message us in the chat bubble if we can help with anything!
All the best!
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.
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.
