Mentor Calum discusses the newest game of the week for Modders!
It’s new release time once again, this week with ‘Phantom Foray’ joining our roster of Modder level Game Dev Club games and it has proven to be popular with our members!
Inspired by the likes of smash hits like ‘Vampire Survivor’ this week’s featured game has players taking on the role of a powerful witch roaming around an arena and taking on wave after wave of deadly spectral enemies. With advanced features and gameplay mechanics such as increasingly difficult enemy spawn timings, pop-up UI damage displays and even RPG levelling up mechanics, this game is the perfect playground for anyone wanting to tinker with something a tad more advanced.
All partaking in the guided hack this week will have constructed a new purchasable player attack. Now instead of players merely having the option to upgrade one of their passive abilities with each new level, they will be presented a further option of purchasing a ranged attack capable of blasting away the nearest enemy to our player-controlled Witch.
Taking a deeper look under the hood of our latest hack will present coders the opportunity to learn a bit more about working with on-screen menus, managing their contained items, and the benefits of list sorting when working with a collection of sprites arranged by distance from the player.
This week has also brought a few exciting changes to your Code Zone Dashboards and how progression takes place between our set difficulty levels. Your coders will hear and see more about the specifics of these changes in their clubs over the coming sessions but be sure to encourage your young coders to message us with any and all questions they may have about their new progression system!
Catch you next time!
Calum
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.
