Whatever Shall We Do: The Games

So this is the Game Dev Club, right? So what the heck are we going to make? I want the kids heavily involved in the decision making for the final game we make (obviously with a lot of direction and guidance from me). I also want them to understand what they are making at least a high level. For every game we make, I want the kids to be involved and see or hear something that they recognize as their own every time they play it.

Making a big game is obviously a huge investment of time and we want the kids to see something cool right away. I was thinking we start them off by doing a twist on a classic. We start with a super simple, very well known puzzle game, the sliding tile game! It is simple enough that it can be done in under 500 lines of code and only has a few art assets involved. Below I already have an example of it playing with some of my daughter's art as an example.

We can walk the kids through the tools we'll be using using this simple game. Then we can walk them through the code. We can then turn the kids lose to swap in art and tweak things if they want. Add sound effects, change art, add backgrounds, change resolutions, and increase/decrease the difficulty.

Next step after that is we can add a new mechanic, a clock that starts as soon as the puzzle finishes shuffling and stops when the puzzle is solved. Bam! We have created a new game mechanic and given the kids a way to challenge each other!

That alone should be enough explaining and experimenting for a class or two! The next step for expanding this game requires the standup arcade machine we plan on making. The next big jump for the game is to make it head-to-head multiplayer on the stand up arcade machine. This will require a way for players to join a game by pressing the joystick button. Then it will have to create a puzzle per person playing and have the controls for it associated with the specific joysticks. Then we'll need win conditions!

While I'll probably end up coding the majority of things to keep things moving along, we'll talk through all of it as we go and I'll explain the code and logic. The kids can then go back later and modify and tweak it. (More on how we'll be building and sharing things in an upcoming post. Spoilers, Git + Jenkins) We can also use this time to discuss win conditions and maybe other game mechanics. For instance, how many win conditions and scenarios can you name? Every person for themselves, first one to finish wins. Team vs Team, all members must complete to win. Team vs Team, first team with one completed wins! How about "attacks" or "glitches" that you could have in the game? How about an option to Glitch a competitor that locks your puzzle for 5 seconds but then horizontally or vertically flips your opponent's puzzle? How about a special that appears randomly in a covered tile and makes it glow, if the player gets the open tile to that square, it sends a swarm of bug VFX to fly around the other players puzzles?

Get the kids brainstorming and help them think about it logically. What are some mechanics from their favorite games and could they be used here somehow?

To give a rough idea of what a 1v1 game might look like, I present Cozy Llama vs Fennec Foxicorn!