The amazing and stupidly easy GameMaker

Yes, I was supposedly working on NEF game for a month however the real working week for me is 3 weeks. On the third week of June (June 17 to June 21), I helped Jake and Chris with their Mobile Game Summer Camp. This was a summer camp for middle school kid to make a mobile game. Jake told me early June that he was planning to teach those kids making game with GameMaker and he had no experience at all with GameMaker. So did Chris. So, I volunteering to help them with their programming class. I am glad I did offer my assistance. I had a really great time with those kids and being useful for the class.

Paper prototyping time

The summer camp had already finished but the amazement of how the kids were doing still impressed me. As programmer, me and Chris often thought it's unbelievable that those kids who mostly don't know programming at all made this complete simple side scrolling game. Although it wasn't a complete game, still it was impressing. Frankly, one or two kids even don't know how to operate the computer well even though they can play internet games well. Strange but it's reality.

Even though this is middle school kids camp, we still teach them making the game in the way we did it: brain storming, paper prototyping, and making the real game! Some of them opposed when we told them to do the paper prototyping. They said they had already had a real game idea and they know exactly what they wanted to do. However we told them to do so because there are always things that you might miss when you designing a game and indeed some of them - after some feedback from us or from other group - changed their game play.

A tour to EAE north lab

Of course that wasn't the only thing they did during a week summer camp. They had also a tour to EA (which I missed) and a tour to EAE North Lab. Corrinne was hosting them in the small lobby area we had in North Lab. Corrinne had a nice discussion with them about game and what they need to do if they want to work in game industry. Well, these kids join this camp not because their parents made them to but because they are interesting in making game and want to work in game industry some day. And to facilitate their experience, they, of course, need to make the game - the digital version!

Start from Tuesday morning, when they learnt the technology they were going to use -GameMaker - we had lab time to work on their game. The first working day - Wednesday - was chaotic. Everyone lost on the technology. Almost every single team raised their hand all the time to ask for assistance. While there were some kids were enthusiastic in making their game, sadly, there were also kids only spending time to play Minecraft and other online game. =( In the end of the day, we discussed this situation with Roger and he gave us idea to compete all the kids by asking them to present their game to the class. So, in the next morning we did that and... it worked!!! I could see everyone got more enthusiastic into their game and start implementing what the other team had into their game. For example, there were a team implementing character selection and another team implementing direction screen. After the presentation, another team will ask our help to implement the character selection/ direction screen. This is really good sign! Thanks, Roger.

Play testing time

We planned to let the kids showed off their game to their parents on the last day. Sadly, it didn't happen. It was a pity, too, that we didn't have enough time to let each team play the other team's game, too. However, we got all the teams game and I copied each all of them to their flash disk. Oh, I forgot to mention we divided the 21 kids into 8 groups of two or three people.  So total, we had 8 games: Asteroid Attack, Balloon Boost, Cave Runner, Kaiso Quest, Prison Break, Space Voyage, Tank Trouble, The Floating Panda.

Did I mention that we had 4 girls? Those girls did a really good job and their game was fun, too: Balloon Boost and The Floating Panda. We, the teacher, agreed that Balloon Boost was one of the best game. The Floating Panda was not bad, too. It was interesting. It was just their art were not well themed. It felt like random art put in together. Why Balloon Boost was one of the best game? It was because they were the only team who got the level. The difficulty of the game increased by time and they had booster, increasing speed by time, and stuff. They got all what needed to make the game engaging!

Mobile Game Summer camp group picture - the only picture with me, sadly

In the end of the camp, we took the picture together - finally I got my picture with the kids!! And the three of us: me, Jake, and Chris did a short post-mortem of what we had done during this week. We all agreed that we could do better in the next camp. Luke said there were still 60 kids on the waiting list so we were planning to have two more summer camps in the end of this month and next month before the semester start. We also agreed that dividing the kids into a team of 3 was not a good idea. We saw that the teams with 3 people tend to have one kid did nothing. For the next camp, we will divide them into a team of 2, we will also set up a blog for them to post their update everyday so the parents can see it and they could compete with each other. And when they start building their game, we will have them present their progress everyday to the class. Yes, the next camp will be much better!