This week, our Hackers in Game Dev Club have been playing Arch Enemy and we've had some AMAZING hacks from our young coders! In this game, we play as Zonebot and are shooting the targets that float by onto our screen. However, we aren't alone; we are with Arch-Enemy-Zonebot, who is also trying to shoot the targets and take our precious points! We have 60 seconds to shoot as many targets as possible and to get more points that Arch-Enemy-Zonebot.
To make the game a bit easier for the player, this week's Guided Hack uses a multiplier mechanic. We create a new sprite which randomly appears across the screen every 5 to 15 seconds. If this is struck by Zonebot's arrow it activates our multiplier variable. At the beginning of the game the multiplier is set to 1, but once struck it changes to 5 (or more as some of hackers did!) - this means that for 10 seconds when we shoot the target we get five times the amount of points as usual. Perfect for beating our pesky Arch-Enemy-Zonebot!
We also saw some other cool hacks today - we created a win and a lose screen which would activate at the end of the 60 seconds and check the scores to determine which screen to show. We also made more power-ups which included faster arrows, fire arrows and even explosion arrows!
Also a big well done to everyone who participated in our Summer Game Jam - we had some amazing Elemental entries that our mentors are LOVING!
We can't wait to host the next Game Jam soon - do you have any ideas or themes you'd like to see?
About The Code Zone Academy
Posts like this one are written by the mentors, about what members have been building. The Game Dev Academy has no fixed session time: a new build goes up every week and a child opens it whenever they are ready, with a STEM-certified mentor answering by text and video message when they get stuck.
Children build their own games rather than following a set course, starting in Scratch. Levels move down as readily as up, and staying where you are is a perfectly good outcome. Every mentor is background-checked and STEM-certified.
The blog is in two halves. Guides are the evergreen explainers written by the mentors who teach the clubs, covering the questions parents actually ask: what comes after Scratch, how to support a coding-mad child when you cannot code yourself, and what works for autistic and ADHD children.
Club news is the other half, and it is where posts like this one live: game jams, Minecraft builds and weekly roundups, written up by whoever ran the session. Neither is marketing. If you want to know what the work actually looks like before you sign up to anything, club news is the more honest read of the two.
