Unpublished
This wiki will not appear in search results, but can still be viewed by anyone!
About the Course
Physics Game Design is a one-day course where the students work through a tutorial to create their own level (or levels) of a game called 'Space Monkey'. It's designed as an introduction to the world of game programming and to allow them to quickly build a fun, good-looking game. As such there are some shortcuts we take. We don't expect for them to be expert game programmers at the end (although nobody ever could in one day), but we hope to stimulate their interest and show them that game programming is not as hard as some people think ...
We're trying to get the students to:
- Quickly build a fun game
- Understand the basic elements of games - the idea, the artistic resources and the technical programming
- Have an introduction to GameMaker
- Experience both some drag-and-drop and textual programming
The Kit List
Student consumables (one per student to take home)
- USB flash drive
Student non-consumables (one per student, not to take home)
- 1 x Headphones
General class items
- Printed 'Course Notes' for each tutor as a reference to all the steps in the video
Preparing Yourself
Like any practical course you'll find this much easier to teach if you have run through it yourself as completely as possible first.
As a minimum, you'll need to:
- Read through this guide completely and be comfortable with it
- Run through the student's guide completely, watching all videos and building the game yourself
As the start of this course is tutor-led you'll also need to run through your delivery of the course a couple of times - ideally out loud, but at least in your head. If you are working with more than one tutor, you will want to decide between yourselves how to split the tasks/explanations in this initial part of the lesson.
Pre-Camp Setup (By Tech Camp)
- Install Gamemaker onto computers (note that this is version 1.4 which is not the current version (2 - which has just been released and is substantially different). This special installation only requires unzipping and can be run standalone without installation by clicking on the executable in the unzipped folder.
- If you have any issues with installation, here are some troubleshooting tips
- Install the 'Space Monkey Base.gmx' directory somewhere accessible by the students (perhaps on their USB keys if you have access to them, or preferably they can do this themselves - it is on their guide as well so you might want to try this first and see how it goes).
IT Systems Check
- GameMaker folder is unzipped and executable launches
- GameMaker can successfully run one of the Demo games which you can load from the launch screen
- Students able to download and successfully compile the base Space Monkey game - if not, pre-download and put onto their memory sticks
- Sound and USB ports functional on computers
- Student logins work for this website
- All videos work in the student guide
- Check following websites are available:
- vimeo.com
- courses.techcamp.org.uk
Pre-Course Setup
- Make sure students come with their flash drives (if run at a camp where we supply them at the start of the week).
- Start up presentation on screen
Rules for Students
This course is primarily delivered by a number of video tutorials. For this to work well, the students should:
- Follow along with the videos, doing exactly the same steps
- Pause frequently so that they can do just one or two steps at a time
- Rewind if necessary to watch steps again
- Save their work regularly in case GameMaker crashes
Guidelines for Tutors
- Game Maker, like many game development systems can occasionally crash - remind the students to save their work regularly
- If a step appears not to have worked, check that you have pressed the 'OK' button to save any changes on the current screen (or the button with a picture of a tick on some screens)
- Game Maker does not like it if you stretch some of the objects and brings up an error message so it is best not to do this. The error message is "Image scale for physics object using circle collision should not vary across axes:" and then it displays the object name that has been stretched. Look out for funny 'stretched' and 'blocky' sprites. (This is partly why we have two different sizes of asteroids rather than just using stretched versions of one).
- Sometimes funny things can happen if objects are placed outside of a room. By dragging the 'view port' around while in the room view, you can check if any objects are outside of the room and delete them (the outside of the room is shown as a checkerboard pattern).
- The videos have been written with the assumption that the Tech Camp laptops are being used so the location of the files/icons, etc that you are using may be different. You will need to ensure when the students are loading up the 'base' project and saving it under their own name (in the very first step) that they know where you want it to be saved (will probably be on their flash drive).
- You might find it useful to refer to the 'Course Notes' document for brief summaries of all the steps in the different videos when students ask you questions - there's lots of lines of code that need to be typed directly and having access to this document will prevent you from having to go back to the videos to check the student's work and try to find mistakes.
Running the Session
- Tutors introduce themselves / kids introduce themselves
- Optional welcome activity
Now Start the slideshow. If there is a problem with access this url (or your computer doesn't have flash) you can download a standalone executable of it here. (You'll need to unzip the contents somewhere on your local machine and then run the prezi.exe file).
Here are some suggested script notes:
- (Advance slide - bubble ball game) Ask students if anyone has played this game before? Tell them that here's a picture of the programmer who created this game ...
- (Advance slide - Robert Nay) He created this when he was 14 years old. It's a physics-based game and in the first 2 weeks was downloaded over 2 million times – enough to knock Angry Birds off top space! Ask them how much a typical game costs on a phone and let them do the calculation to work out how much he could have made if it was a commercially sold game (although it wasn't!) Explain that there's other ways of making money out of games including advertising.
- (Advance slide - Triangle) Good games have to have three key ingredients - a great idea for a game, ,some great artistic resources like sprites (pictures of characters) and sound effects, and an understanding of programming to actually do all of the hard work! Most game development today is done in teams so one person doesn't need to have all the skills - perhaps you're an idea person or an artistic person (or love programming) ... you could work with others who have talent in the other areas. In fact there's some great artistic resources available on the web for free if you want to create a professional game quickly like we have - our 'Space Monkey' graphics were all produced by a professional illustrator who made their work freely available. (Could mention websites like Opengameart and freesound here).
- (Advance slide - Game Maker): Explain what game maker is - how it is quick to get up and running, you can start with drag and drop and advance to proper text-based programming and you can make much more sophisticated games than you can with something like scratch.
- (Advance slide - Angry Birds): Demo Angry Cats (demo game in Game Maker) to show them how they've replicated the fun physics and graphics of Angry Cats and that you can make really nice-looking games in Game Maker.
- (Advance slide - 'Today') Explain what we'll be doing today
- (Advance slide - 'Top Tips') Explain the top tips
The students will then put on their headphones and work through the tutorial material on the videos to make their game!
Extension Challenges
Here are some ideas for extensions:
- Create another level (room) and work out how to go to the next room after you've finished the level in the previous one
- Change the sound effects for one or more of the sounds using resources on the web or a sound effect creator like this one
- Change the sprites for one or more of the graphical elements using resources on the web or the inbuilt sprite editor