What are some Game Design Activities?

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Bbaker248

Guest
I will be sponsoring a Game Design Club at a middle school that I work at. The materials ordered won't be here this week and probably not next week, so what are some cool activities related to game dev or game design that I can have the kids do or perhaps good videos to show. Any ideas are welcome!

One thought I had was have the kids try and use Pokemon Go and I will hand them a genre and they try and use the Pokemon Go concept and tweak it to fit different genres like medieval or space then show the Extra Credits they did on the same idea.

Do you have any others I would love to hear them!
 
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MishMash

Guest
Is this just about game design, or is the possibility of Game Development/learning to program also on the cards?
 
are they using gms?

if so my advise to you is to teach them about how to use point angle, point direction, lengthdir_x and lengthdir_y and just let them go nuts with it. its staggering the number of things you can do with just those commands and nothing else, it will be a good test of their creativity, grapple hooks, guns, orbiting planets, simulations of analog clocks inside of a digital computer, catapults, vision cones, arms and legs, radars, lasers, mirrors, chains, spinning stuff, attacking enemies and of course the grand daddy of them all, double pendelums.

thats just off the top of my head, im sure the kids could find more stuff to do
 

Surgeon_

Symbian Curator
are they using gms?

if so my advise to you is to teach them about how to use point angle, point direction, lengthdir_x and lengthdir_y and just let them go nuts with it. its staggering the number of things you can do with just those commands and nothing else, it will be a good test of their creativity, grapple hooks, guns, orbiting planets, simulations of analog clocks inside of a digital computer, catapults, vision cones, arms and legs, radars, lasers, mirrors, chains, spinning stuff, attacking enemies and of course the grand daddy of them all, double pendelums.

thats just off the top of my head, im sure the kids could find more stuff to do
Depends on how old are the kids. Trigonometry is something not many 12-year-olds can grasp...
 

Nallebeorn

Member
Depends on how old are the kids. Trigonometry is something not many 12-year-olds can grasp...
I'm not 12-year old anymore, of course, but trigonometry with GameMaker's helper functions should be pretty easy to grasp if taught well, even if they aren't quite ready for the more low-level sin/cos and Pythagoras theorem stuff.
 

Surgeon_

Symbian Curator
I'm not 12-year old anymore, of course, but trigonometry with GameMaker's helper functions should be pretty easy to grasp if taught well, even if they aren't quite ready for the more low-level sin/cos and Pythagoras theorem stuff.
Still, I believe there are more interesting things with which to start teaching programming to kids / students that trigonometry, no matter how simplified it is in Game Maker.
 
you dont need to bust out the trigonometry, that said arnt kids learning that stuff by that age? i mean it would be an excellent tie in to math class but that aside just do something simple like here is a tank, teach the tank to move via wasd, teach the tank to rotate around to follow the mouse and when you fire set up the angle and direction the fired bullet travels to go in the direction the tank is pointed.

then move on to walls, teach how to not have the tank pass through walls, teach how to have the bullet stop when it hits a wall, then tell the kids to copy the tank object, remove the wasd controls and then to put in a step event using point distance so they have a radius and if you come within the radius they shot.

from there you could spend days constructing levels and teaching about cones of vision so players can hide behind walls, then move on to making objects that follow the player like zombies or magnets, then objects that flee you get the idea.

the thing is with the exception of wasd all of this can be taught with the four commands above and if you replace the wasd with a walk forward and back and rotate left and right system then all of this can be taught with those four commands.
 
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Bbaker248

Guest
Is this just about game design, or is the possibility of Game Development/learning to program also on the cards?
Well Game Design mostly, but I would like to throw in other game development topics sprinkled in. The thing is as of right now we will not have the computers this week so need some ideas on game design/development type activities I can do until we get our computers.

are they using gms?

if so my advise to you is to teach them about how to use point angle, point direction, lengthdir_x and lengthdir_y and just let them go nuts with it. its staggering the number of things you can do with just those commands and nothing else, it will be a good test of their creativity, grapple hooks, guns, orbiting planets, simulations of analog clocks inside of a digital computer, catapults, vision cones, arms and legs, radars, lasers, mirrors, chains, spinning stuff, attacking enemies and of course the grand daddy of them all, double pendelums.

thats just off the top of my head, im sure the kids could find more stuff to do
Not a bad idea, but I am not sure how well they would pick that up will look into though! Do you have any ideas of things I can do without computers? We will not have any computers this week since they are not in yet and need to fill the time slot with something.

you dont need to bust out the trigonometry, that said arnt kids learning that stuff by that age? i mean it would be an excellent tie in to math class but that aside just do something simple like here is a tank, teach the tank to move via wasd, teach the tank to rotate around to follow the mouse and when you fire set up the angle and direction the fired bullet travels to go in the direction the tank is pointed.

then move on to walls, teach how to not have the tank pass through walls, teach how to have the bullet stop when it hits a wall, then tell the kids to copy the tank object, remove the wasd controls and then to put in a step event using point distance so they have a radius and if you come within the radius they shot.

from there you could spend days constructing levels and teaching about cones of vision so players can hide behind walls, then move on to making objects that follow the player like zombies or magnets, then objects that flee you get the idea.

the thing is with the exception of wasd all of this can be taught with the four commands above and if you replace the wasd with a walk forward and back and rotate left and right system then all of this can be taught with those four commands.
My kids are around the 6th grade level and that type of material is taught when they get into 8th grade. Agreed though that it would be a fun tie in for math classes and even other classes. Been wanting to make a game that would teach the material from different classes since everyone student will have a chromebook so that way they can play some games and actually learn something, but haven't found time to make that.

Any ideas on paper activities or anything non-computer related? We will not have the computers yet, so looking for something to fill this weeks time slot with fun activities or perhaps some videos still trying to flesh it out.
 
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