Hacker Highlight: Ace Pilot

By The Code Zone team 13 September 2023 2 min read

See Arabella's AMAZING Ace Pilot Game below - full of colour and her own mods

Welcome back to another week of Game Dev Club! This week, my Modder members are working on Ace Pilot; a flying simulator where the player has to navigate the skies trying to avoid enemy bullets. Last week, our Guided Hack involved a new spawning system which included enemy waves. This week, we are focusing more on cosmetics and animations rather than game mechanics - though they are all linked together to create the polished and finished game!

Today's Guided Hack is adding a smoke effect which appears on the player's plane when they get struck my an enemy pip. The smoke becomes a life indicator which becomes larger and darker the more hits the player takes - neat! To do this we create a smoke asset as well as a smoke variable - with this we can them set the smoke to appear and follow the player's plane's position should our lives every drop below 3. The size is determined by how much life we have; the less lives we have the larger the smoke is. To give the smoke a bit of life and animation, we create a destroy_smoke function which randomly chooses some of the smoke's pixels within its asset to delete. This creates the effect of the smoke moving as it repeats itself, a fun way to do animation without the animation coding blocks

We also had the chance to do some of our Python Coding Skills this week include how to create a sprite within Python. One of my members took this coding skill to the next level by adding as many sprites as they could; practising the written code over and over whilst also exercising their pixel art skills in the asset editor. Well done!

Until next time, happy coding!

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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Hacker Highlight: Ace Pilot

What a week in the clubs looks like

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