Visual Programming – Game Design 101

Description

Prerequisites: Visual Programming 101, Visual Programming 102

Students build an arcade game from start to finish. In this course they program The Drone Menace, an arcade game and skin it with custom packaging. Topics covered include collision detection, scoring, lives, using functions, variables, cloning and skinning the game.

What will students learn?

Basic Programming
After completing this course, students will have a strong understanding of fundamental programming concepts like events, keyboard and mouse interactions, messaging, loops, and conditional statements.
Design Thinking
Programming is an inherently systematic and logical way of providing instructions. Throughout the course, students develop and significantly hone these thinking skills.
Computational Thinking
As students work through the lessons, they acquire computational thinking skills including problem decomposition, pattern recognition, abstraction, algorithmic thinking, abstraction and modeling.
Become a Maker
Every lesson encourages students to create and innovate. By the end of the course they will have learned to build original games, write stories, make animations, generate music, and create algorithmic art.

This course includes 9 lessons with over 40 activities

Basic Game Setup, Program Enemy Drones
Students plan the opening scene with a spaceship and enemy drones that patrol the security zone. They learn to program collisions and explosions.

Add More Enemies, Add a Spaceship Hero
With the basic outline of the game set up, students add different types of drones as well as the spaceship hero.

Detect Collisions, Create Explosions
In this lesson, students make the hero and enemies interact. They learn to program collisions and explosions.

Add Game Elements
Students are introduced to variables. They use variables to keep track of ship counts and implement game lives.

Add a Win Condition and Game Ending
Students learn about winning and losing conditions for the game and review more uses of variables.

Keep Score and Send Messages
Students are introduced to scoring using variables and messaging blocks to communicate with Actors.

Increase Game Difficulty
This lesson introduces game difficulty and making it tougher to win. Students also program cheat codes!

Global Variables and Game Speed
Students learn about Global Variables and then use one to control the speed of the drones.

Multiple Levels and Skinning the Game
This lesson address adding Implement multiple levels, and skinning the game to customize it.

This is a Tynker course with Melamed Academy instructors