Author: Dylan Mowforth

Adobe Character Animator is a very good piece of software, you can animate from your facial expressions, so when you speak the character on screen also moves his mouth which is very good if you want to animate the character to speak a few lines of sentences. With the press of a few buttons, you can also control the characters’ movements.

However, after going through the tutorial and all its steps I tried to export the footage but you can only export in video format and none that would help our game which is a  big issue in why we can’t use this software. If we can find a way around this problem then we will be sure to use this software to aid our game production.

– Dylan

Although these designs are basic it has allowed us to get an even better view on how the game will work. For example, if you click start, it goes straight to the game, How to play goes to the screen which gives you all the information and tools to play, settings will allow you to customise the game experience and finally if you click the website, it will take you to the partnering website. Adobe XD has allowed us to get away from the boring old wireframes and allowed us to add interactivity so we can get an even better feel for the whole scope of how the game will run. This is just a basic wireframe which we can change and add to once we know what capabilities we have when making our game.

This game is not a coding game, however, we really like the style of it. This is roughly how we want our game to look. Not necessarily in art-style, but certainly in level design.

I personally feel like for our research we need to look away from just coding games and although this game isn’t educational either it still has the same mechanics in which we intend to include in our game.

In essence we would like to make a game just like this, however, make it educational because we believe that if you can get people to play games like this for just a few hours a day but with educational factors included in the game then we will have created a successful, educational project that can do good in the world.

This style of game will allow us to add all the aspects of the type of game we want to make, for example, the pickups with the pieces of RAM and the player interaction. This style of platformer game will allow us to bring the coding education and the game together as at certain points in the game we can stop the character and have them answer a coding question before continuing.

Watch Ryan test play a level from the game. (In-game footage/audio only).

-Dylan

(Click image above to play game in a new tab)

This game is worth reviewing because it is styled very similarly style with other coding games.

Almost immediately after playing these types of games Ryan and I decided that we don’t want to do a game like this because the drag and drop system doesn’t allow the player to learn as well as if they were writing the code themselves. By dragging and dropping blocks of code, the user can simply remember the block shape and therefor not even need to read the code, let alone learn it.

The game is simple and easy to play which is perfect for its intended target audience. We like some aspects of the game such as the character customisation – where you can change the hand. We also like how easy it is to play the game; you can jump straight in without any information.

The style of game differs a lot from our first thoughts of what we envisioned our game to look like. The layout of this game is similar to what we’d like ours to look like. We like the split-screen technique with the use of the court one side and then the lines of code the other, however we plan on having a larger game screen to improve enjoyment. We will need to have a well sized code area though as it is a big element in our project and we cannot shy away from that. In order to give the code element of the game more emphasis whilst still having a game screen big enough to be played it might be worth styling the code area to be similar to the game or to link one way or another; as if it were actually in-game.

We don’t like the drag & drop blocks in the above example because we feel as though the player is less able to engage with the subject matter at hand, and therefore is less likely to learn as they can simply learn which blocks go where by shape alone.

– Dylan

Firstly I thought that I would start by getting our ideas onto paper of how want the overall game to plan out. Here are the results:

We needed to get a plan for the how the game navigation will work so I added 4 options; one to go straight into the game, a how to play button, settings and a button which will be linked to the partnering website. On the how to play screen there will be a lot of information on how to play the actual game so like the buttons (w,a,s,d) and alongside them there will be screenshots from in game showing an example. I have added a settings option just in case we need it or not so that is not final as of yet as we me not even need it but it is certainly something to consider.

The next part I have broken down how the game is going to look, for example you can see where text is going to be, where the character is going to be and the obstacles etc.

-Dylan