Welcome back! It is so nice to see everyone's refreshed faces after the half-term break! This week we are hacking The Code Zone's latest Scratch game: Battle Tanks!
In this defence game, the player controls a lone tank that has to escape from enemy fire. By manoeuvring the tank and using some of its own missiles, players have to survive as long as possible to get the highest score.
Of course the first thing our hackers wanted to do was the Guided Hack which gives our tank a sneaky little land mine to help keep those pesky enemies at bay! We utilise some keyboard sensing code which allowed us to deploy our mine at the touch of a button. By using some colour changing effect blocks and by coding in a timer, our tank can keep track of where the mine is and when it will blow, making it oh-so fun to lead enemy tanks straight into its path - BOOM!
My Tuesday group loved the Guided Hack so much that they were very eager to add some more weapons into Battle Tanks such as flamethrowers, rockets and machine guns. We decided to code in a power-up booster which would grant us the new weapon. By using randomisation code, our power-up pop-up would appear at random points and random times on the screen for the player to pick up. By using a variable, the power up would become active upon touching the tank and thus would grant the brand new weapon - cool!
One last thing... a big well done to all our members who participated in our Evolution Game Jam last week. There were some really amazing games and your creativity never fails to impress! There's still time to share your project for it to be added to our Game Jam Page - if you need any help doing this just drop one of us mentors a message and we will show you how to share the project
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.
