Wecome Back to Game Dev Club!

By The Code Zone team 6 June 2023 2 min read

We are making a bold come back with Battle Tanks!

Welcome back! It is so nice to see everyone's refreshed faces after the half-term break! This week we are hacking The Code Zone's latest Scratch game: Battle Tanks!

In this defence game, the player controls a lone tank that has to escape from enemy fire. By manoeuvring the tank and using some of its own missiles, players have to survive as long as possible to get the highest score.

Of course the first thing our hackers wanted to do was the Guided Hack which gives our tank a sneaky little land mine to help keep those pesky enemies at bay! We utilise some keyboard sensing code which allowed us to deploy our mine at the touch of a button. By using some colour changing effect blocks and by coding in a timer, our tank can keep track of where the mine is and when it will blow, making it oh-so fun to lead enemy tanks straight into its path - BOOM!

My Tuesday group loved the Guided Hack so much that they were very eager to add some more weapons into Battle Tanks such as flamethrowers, rockets and machine guns. We decided to code in a power-up booster which would grant us the new weapon. By using randomisation code, our power-up pop-up would appear at random points and random times on the screen for the player to pick up. By using a variable, the power up would become active upon touching the tank and thus would grant the brand new weapon - cool!

One last thing... a big well done to all our members who participated in our Evolution Game Jam last week. There were some really amazing games and your creativity never fails to impress! There's still time to share your project for it to be added to our Game Jam Page - if you need any help doing this just drop one of us mentors a message and we will show you how to share the project

View all the projects from the Evolution Game Jam here

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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Wecome Back to Game Dev Club!

What a week in the clubs looks like

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