Mr. Isaacs' Game Design and Development Blog

Are you interested in the STEM video game challenge for middle school students? My game design and development students are participating. If you are looking for more information, they are hosting a live call this afternoon to address any questions.

The STEM video game challenge encourages students to use their choice of video game creation tools including Gamestar Mechanic, Game Maker, Game Salad, Scratch, Kodu Game Lab, or other tools to create original video games.

LIVE Q & A Call
Questions about the Challenge? Join us for a live Q & A call, open to parents, teachers and students.

Date: Wednesday, December 8th, 2010
Time: 4:30PM-5:30 Eastern Standard Time
How: Call Toll Free 1-866-213-1863 code: 4029345

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What an opportunity!!!

http://www.stemchallenge.org/public/ChallengeInfo.aspx

The stem challenge is looking for entries in a number of categories related to game design and development.  You can submit a game design document, a game created in GameMaker 8, Scratch, Kodu Game Lab, as well as a number of other development environments. 

If you submit an entry, you will receive a special achievement for ‘Game Design and Development competitor‘.  Your existing adventure game might even meet the criteria.

Perhaps you can take some time to fine tune the design document and improve upon the game to make it contest worthy.  GOOD LUCK!!!

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Webspiration is a wonderful tool that allows you to create a visual mindmap online. I created a mindmap to assist you with the design document process. Please view my mindmap and feel free to use the general idea as you develop design documents for your games. You can use webspiration to create your own design document based on my example.

Design Document Mindmap Example

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Greetings.  During class sessions in my Game Design and Development course, I have been recording lessons as I teach my students how to use GameMaker 8.  Please enjoy the tutorials.  

They should help you with all of the basic GameMaker skills including:

• Working in the GameMaker environment
• Creating Sprites
• Proper Naming Convention for game elements
• Creating Objects
• Programming objects to function in your game
• Scoring
• Conditional Statements
• Timers / Loops
• Creating moving objects (projectiles)

If there are other topics you would like to see covered, feel free to drop a line.

All videos can be found on my YouTube Channel:

http://www.youtube.com/MrSRIsaacs

Enjoy!

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I wanted to share a wonderful resource my students started to use in our game development course to assist with learning valuable gamemaker skills. 

GameMaker Video Tutorials provides a number of step by step videos to guide learners through the process.  So far, the most helpful for my students has been the current featured video on creating platform games.  There are many more videos and I am sure we will continue to use the site extensively.

Thanks to the creators of the site for the GREAT content!

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Recently, my students took a trip back in time, circa 1980s when coin operated video games were all the rage. This time period is responsible for classics including PacMan, Ms. PacMan, Defender, Stargate, Robotron, Berzerk, Asteroids, Pong, Donkey Kong, Frogger, and many (many) more.

Students played Flash versions of classic games and chose a retro arcade game to recreate. The goal was to ‘deconstruct the game’ and come as close to the recreating the original as possible using GameMaker.

For me, this was certainly a trip down memory lane. 

After much hard work by my students, the games were unveiled to a jury of their peers.  There were attempts at Asteroids, Pac Man, Frogger, Dig Dug, Arkanoid, Break Out, Pong, Space Invaders, Super Mario Brothers, and Tetris.  Participants certainly met their share of challenges along the way.  Many persevered and made fantastic replicas of the classic games.  Please enjoy playing the games that won our in-class competition.  The games below represent 1st, 2d, and 3d place in each of the three sections of the course:

Asteroids: Recreated by Vincent
Asteroids: Recreated by Jonathan
Super Mario Brothers: Recreated by Nikhil
Arkanoid: Recreated by Darius
Frogger: Recreated by Nick
Space Invaders: Recreated by Robert
Pong: Recreated by Luis
Pong: Recreated by Sean

ENJOY!!

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Today, I introduced Visual C# and XNA Studio to my students. This is going to be quite a difference from GameMaker. I love GameMaker and think it is a great teaching tool. Now, we move to true programming. XNA Studio (http://creators.xna.com) is a framework developed to work with Visual C# to help developers create games for the PC, Xbox 360, and Zune handheld.

Thankfully, there are many resources available for teaching XNA Studio. My students are starting with Rob Miles ebook.
I will post a direct link to the book when I locate it again

Steve

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Our first project involved students in learning the basics of gamemaker.  Initially, they recreated the game ‘Catch the Clown’ just to learn the gamemaker interface as well as adding sprites, sounds, objects, backgrounds, and action to a game.  The guidelines indicated that the game should:

1. incorporate multiple levels
2. include sound
3. utilize a variety of sprites for graphic in the game
4. include objects that are programmed (some that move and react autmoatically, and at least one character controlled by the player with the mouse and/or keyboard)

And the winners are…