Gamemaker
I love it when a plan comes together. Last year technical difficulties beset one of our Breeze projects and it really felt like the project was unsuccessful. I saw something in Priory school today that revised my evaluation…
Project Remote Control
In the summer term last year we offered a series of master classes in Gamemakersoftware to pupils at two schools in the county, to asess it’s suitability for teaching control in Year 9. The idea was that as there was no resident expertise in the school for this software and the schools are twenty miles apart it would have been difficult for either my colleague Steve or myself to deliver after-school classes in both. As Steve was keen to see pupils using this software (as was I) we looked to Macromedia Breeze to deliver the lessons online, with pupils from both schools benefitting. As I said earlier, technical difficulties arose from all sorts of unexpected angles, and with the summer holidays approaching we ran out of time to complete the lessons we had planned. Although the majority of pupls involved got something out of the project it was not as much as we had hoped so we licked our wounds, rubbed our bruises and wrote it off to experience, maybe to resurrect the project in the next school year.
But I’m working in Priory today, doing some Hands On Support. Over lunchtime in comes David, who was on the original Breeze pilot team, and we met online over a webcam once or twice so it was good to meet him personally (he’s taller in real life). He was eager to show me the a 25-level game he’s written in Gamemaker and IT IS ASTOUNDING. Very like Pacman, the character is a keyboard-steered ghost who collects various artefacts around the screen while pursued by the inevitable ghosts (who turn into skulls if you put a step wrong). Yep, you read it right the first time, he’s pursued by them - David tells me that the code he’s written makes them follow him - I didn’t get the details but it looks like a kind of “fuzzy logic” algorithm judging by the gameplay. And when you eventually get caught by the ghost/skulls and lose all your lives - well, it’s inevitable, like taxation. But at least your glory is recorded on the leaderboard. And what’s more, the game auto-saves so that you only need to go back to the next level.
David is a Year 10 pupil. Such talent and dedication as his is rare - He was Year 9 when we started the project and he’s done all the programming at home, since the school network won’t allow Gamemaker to create .exe files. What’s more, for Year 7 pupils he’s written a 10 page guide to creating platform games. He has a number of other games in development, and the games already written he sells for 65p a go. And they’re going like hot cakes, I’m told.
There’s always a downside. I asked David if he would email me his work, and he happily agreed. “Excellent” I thought, “I can claim it as my own. Plagiarism is my middle name!”. Apparently his teacher’s thought of this. But as you’d expect from a boy of such talent, David has thought of it too. He’s hard-coded his name and contact details into the game so nobody can steal it. Curses! I’ll be back, next time with a video camera and a voice recorder so that I can podcast his work with links to what he’s done.
November 27th, 2005 at 7:27 pm
Budding game writer
This post on the Primeradiant blog tells of a budding writer of game software at Priory. He’s written a number of games already and is selling them to his schoolmates.
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