Be Excellent To Each Other

So, I got this text from a work-shy teacher friend:

I'm thinking "no". Even ignoring the cheap/free bit, the idea that people with a vague working knowledge of computing would be able to make a working level of a game with "characters" (which I'm assuming wipes out using games with level editors) is a bit slim.

Is there something I've not thought of?

There's some kind of rpg maker, but I cannot vouch for its price nor quality.

Similarly, I think there's some kind of point and click game maker. Similar lack of vouching.

GameMaker purports to allow simple game creation using 'drag and drop' with a scripting language sitting behind it for real developers but I've never used it so don't know how realistic those claims are.

Tell them to use minecraft

There are a few things out there, but the main one used these days is Scratch

http://scratch.mit.edu/

I've not used it myself, but a lot of teachers were raving about it at a recent "computing for schools" conference I was at.

Have they already moved on from Turtle?

My first game was using HyperCard on the Mac to navigate between cards with buttons, drawings and events on them.

Obviously back in the day we had the Graphic Adventure Creator and SEUK. However I did a quick Google and there's a SEUK remake:

http://seuck.glbasic.com

Dunno what it's like.

There's quite a few options, actually, but these are generally regarded as the "best" two.

GameMaker Studio
Construct

Personally I preferred Construct to GameMaker, but I never really got on with the "code-free" aspect of it so now I'm fucking about with Unity again.

Scratch is pretty much pure coding, isn't it? There's no way they could do that.

How much cheating are they allowed to do? They could find an old copy of Neverwinter Nights on PC and build themselves a D&D RPG.

Not sure. There were primary school teachers talking about how their 7yr olds were using it, so it can't be that tricky.

It uses a drag and drop interface to build up "scripts" I think, or recipes as IFTTT would call them

So, "when X clicked, do this, do this, do that" type things.

If you don't tell a kid that something is hard to do, they don't know that it's hard.

It's what Code Club uses to teach kids about programming, but I'd imagine it's not helped by the fact that the teacher in the OP is an English teacher

Hotline Miami was made with game maker, so at least we know that it's capable of making good games. Don't know if that's as easy as they claim to do though.

Neverwinter Nights is a good option as someone else said, or other games with a built in conduction kit like Shadowrun or legend of Grimrock. Fallout 3 also has it, but I guess it might be hard.

Why the fuck is he doing it then?

They should worry. We had a teacher who was terrified of the BBC Micro that sat in the corner of the classroom. The cassette didn't have an autostop and when a program loaded the poor old tape recorder would sit there squealing because she insisted the play button needed to remain down. One day I pressed stop, got a bollocking and was told if I had broken anything I'd have to pay.

I'd had a CPC for about a year at that stage and wondered why the school had wasted money on something with less memory, less colours, no disk drive and a TV instead of a monitor that we only ever played Fun School on or that game where you had to get a fox, a man and a chicken across a river.

The Network Manager at my secondary school once threatened me with expulsion because he saw me playing the pinball game that was hidden in Word '97, and he was convinced it was a virus that I'd put on to the machine.

Have you tried asking Volition Inc?

She. And you appear to have a very optimistic view about the resources available at some schools

http://www.computingatschool.org.uk/

These are the people who will know and would be willing to give any help they can, if she isn't already in contact with them.

But hasn't she chosen to do this as some kind of an English project? If so I think I would advise her to have a rethink. Perhaps just get them to sort of storyboard and design a game and write the dialogue for it. Trying to actually make the game would be far too technical an exercise for an English class I'd have thought.

Sorry, she.

I haven't mentioned anything about resources.

As a school project can't they just plan on making a game? Draw the levels, characters and describe what you do in it.

Lolz what mark said

It's not English, it's something to do with this:
http://www.ocr.org.uk/Images/67383-unit ... -games.pdf

That seems to stop short of actually making anything as well. It's more or less doing what we just said but in quite a lot of detail. It'll still be a struggle for a teacher without much prior knowledge of video games though.

None of that mentions, or even wants, any actual code to be written and is a pure design exercise though. It could be easily argued that by attempting to have them produce an actual product they'll waste time not doing what that course actually wants them to do, instead getting bogged down in implementation while not ticking off those objectives. Let's face it, if you give some kids a choice between (a) sitting down and writing up detailed design docs for something or (b) fiddling with a tool to see if they can make a game there's no way in hell they'll choose the former. Which means they'll fail the module (as it's described in that PDF anyway).

ETA: I presume she's looking for a tool that'll let them knock something functional up as a way to keep them interested which is understandable and laudable, but as she has no knowledge whatsoever in doing that and it's almost certainly a lot harder and more time-consuming than she thinks I'd worry that it'll end up derailing the entire thing.

That .pdf wasn't actually in relation to this specifically (it was a question from her about some of the words used (like Interface) a few months back).


What's ETA?

Beside Estimated Time of Arrival, I guess.

"edited to add"

I think I asked that on these very boards a few years back.

Malc

This forum. The only type of board this is is an ironing board

Ah, so when you said:



you meant:

they could make their own text adventure? I looked at using this when I had a hare-brained idea for my CV, seemed pretty straightforward.

http://textadventures.co.uk/quest

I condidered them, but I did one of them for a Beex Weex once. It got very complicated very quickly.

Play: http://textadventures.co.uk/games/view/ ... /beex-weex

Nice! Not for the first time, I appear to have got stuck trying to interfere with a litter bin in Hyde Park.

The heck is that??

That sounds waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay more complicated than anything we had to do for our BSc. Hons Computer Games Technology degree.

I'd say Klik 'n' Play first, then Game Maker. Scratch is a little weird to get your head around. Anything is going to take quite some time to get working, then get accustomed to, and then understand to the point where you can make something. I'd say 'give it up'.

The ultimate game design tool of course is pen and paper (or a big whiteboard if theres more than one of you).

Oh yes, drawing out level plans on graph paper!

This has now reminded me of the time we designed board games at school, with rulesets, levels etc. That was also an English class, weirdly.

Theres Lunar Magic if you want to Level edit Marioworld (requires separate rom).