Cops & Robbers

By The Code Zone team 19 September 2023 2 min read

Zombies and Scientist!

See Jan's super cool Cop and Robbers Game below - or should I say Zombies and Scientist!

This week in Game Dev Club, our Modders have been coding a brand new game: Cops and Robbers. In this top-down tile game, the players take control of a robber who is sneaking through the maze to get to the treasure chest. However, our robber isn't alone! Throughout the maze, there are several cops patrolling and if they spot our robber they will pick up speed and charge after them. If the cops catch up to the robber, it is game over - so stealth is key to this game!

In today's Guided Hack, we decide to make this game of cat and mouse even more interesting. By adding a key-code into our game that opens up the chest, the robber now has to spend more time looking through the maze for the note containing the code. In addition, once the key-code has been entered into the treasure chest the robber now has to make an escape through one of the 4 starting points - but only one is open and the rest are closed down so don't get cornered by the cops when running for the exit! To do this we code two functions; one which generates the keycode for the player to input and one which creates the escape route for the robber. We also edit the overlapping code for the player sprite and the chest sprite so that instead of rewarding us points upon contact, it will now ask for the code and check if it matches with the randomly generated one.

This Guided Hack gets our coders to consider strings and integers and the difference between them as we code our robber sprite to say the number held in the key-code variable. This takes us onto this week's coding skill: String Casting. In this coding skill, we use a Python function known as casting. This turns a integer (in this case our key-code number) and converts it to a string so that the robber can say it. A very useful Python function to keep in your back pocket for future projects

What a week in the clubs looks like

Posts like this one are what actually happens in a session, written by the mentors who ran it. A Game Dev Club session is one hour a week, in a group of no more than six, with the same mentor every week, online or at one of our in-person clubs.

That cap is deliberate: it is what makes it possible for a mentor to notice when a child has gone quiet, or has rebuilt the same game four weeks running because they are avoiding something harder.

Children build their own games rather than working through a set course. Levels move down as readily as up, so the work always fits, and staying where you are is a perfectly good outcome. Every mentor is DBS-checked and STEM-certified.

Most children start in Scratch or MakeCode and move to Python and TypeScript when they are ready. Mentors write a note on every child after every session, which is how we know when somebody is ready to move up, and it is why a child who has gone quiet for three weeks does not simply go unnoticed.

More than a third of our members are autistic or have ADHD, based on what parents tell us when they join. Children can keep the camera off, type instead of speaking, take a break without it disrupting anyone, and step away and come back.

In 2025 we received the Autism Inclusion Award from the National Autistic Society, and in 2026 we were ranked second in the UK in Club Hub UK’s Top 100 Children’s Activity Providers.

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 an hour actually looks like before you book anything, club news is the more honest read of the two.

The first session is a free taster and we do not ask for card details. Book a free taster session, see what it costs, or read about support for neurodivergent children.

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Cops & Robbers

What a week in the clubs looks like

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