On Day 4, students are well on their way to completing their final projects in Design and Code Video Games with Instructor Jennifer Emberton. The objective for the week is to create a simple maze game where a space explorer navigates through an asteroid field to reach their spaceship. Students followed a series of steps to complete the project on Gamefroot, a website that allows users to create 2D games and animations using a visual coding interface and level editor.
Several students like Caden, Milo, and Raven had taken Emberton’s coding class last year and said it helped them to have that background knowledge to build on for this year’s project. It was fun to walk the class and see the creative space games and the special characters going through the mazes. Caden used Batman as his character and Milo had a square-shaped astronaut with no legs and Raven used a space girl to beat the challenges in her game.
To create a higher challenge for returning campers, Emberton added several layers of difficulty with the design of the games such as adding asteroid challenges, extra speed and “shield” power-ups as well as implementing a scoring system.
By the end of the week, these students will leave with a sense of accomplishment knowing they can code a video game!