Hacker Highlight: Santa's Little Helper

For our final game of 2023, we are playing Santa’s Little Helper

Santa's Little Helper
For our final game of 2023, we are playing Santa’s Little Helper. In this game, players take control of an elf who is putting together toys for Santa. Using the arrow keys, the elf moves through the workshop picking up the necessary parts for the toy using the spacebar before placing them in the present box ready for shipping.
 
For our Guided Hack, we added our very own Naughty Code Zone Elf to make the game a bit trickier. With some randomisation code paired with some movement scripts, our Hackers were able to create a naughty elf which would come and steal the present box when the good elves weren’t looking - so be careful with those gifts!
 
There’s still time to join in with the Christmas Game Jam on your dashboard and our mentors are on hand up until the eve of the 22nd to help you out with any of your code and ideas. With that, have a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!
 

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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