Shadowy Shootout

By The Code Zone team 19 July 2023 2 min read

We are back at it again this week modding our Shadowy Shootout game

In this game, we as the player have to survive waves of ghost enemies by running through our maze and blasting them away. This game uses a Ray Cast 3D Render extension which transforms our usual top-down tile maps into a full 3D game! There's also lots of fun coding piece in this extension including the ability to toggle your game from 3D back to top-down view. It also offers some sprite animation which manipulates the sprite's 'Z' axis to give the illusion of movement - very cool

For this week's Guided Hack, we decided to give our maze an upgrade in addition to the bomb upgrade we gave our player last week. We added some doors to our maze so that our player can escape through them. Using on-overlap coding blocks, we coded it so that ONLY a Player-Kind sprite can activate the doorway tiles which open the door - but no other Sprite-Kind can meaning that ghosts are barred from using the escape routes! We saw all sorts of cool doors today from colourful portals to metal trap doors; anything to keep those pesky ghosts away.

Taking the on-overlap code we used today in our game engine, we worked on our 'On Overlap Tile' Coding Skill at the end of the session. This coding skill gets us writing in Python and using variables, functions and a scene.on_overlap_tile script, which changes the background once a certain Sprite-Kind steps on a certain tile. This is incredible useful for when we want sprites to interact with out Tilemap worlds.

If you ever need any help or advice on which Coding Skills to try out, just drop me a message in the Blue Chat Bubble - there's always a mentor on hand to help!

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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Shadowy Shootout

What a week in the clubs looks like

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