2022 September's round up

Welcome to our first blog!
Here is a round up of what we and (more importantly) our students have been up to over the past couple of weeks.

The Bud Club Games Club
At the end of September we were invited to meet two young people at Bud Club Juniors, a fantastic service provided for young people with disabilities provided by The Liberty Consortium
http://libertyconsortium.org.uk/bud
The lads were computer game fanatics and we were asked to come up with a project, with them, to put their immense gaming knowledge and skills to use.
So we decided to make a game! (surprise surprise)
Roles were quickly established, Caolan taking on all the art, and Dillon leading with the programming. And they had no shortage of ideas! As massive fans of Hollow knight, the lads decided to make a platformer.
We started with a platformer with some basic functionality, and built it from there.
Caolan, an accomplished storyteller and artist, led with the story development. Before we knew it we had a saga on our hands! Caolan and Dillon together created a massive imaginary universe, with a backstory, lore and characters galore.
Dillon picked up the programming with ease, and by the end of our time together was solving problems quicker than Caroline! ( a disappearing staff). This caused Katherine a great deal of joy, and she likes to remind Caroline of it as often as humanly possible.
Caolan worked with Procreate (https://procreate.art/) , turning his pen and pencil designs and drawings into assets and animations.
The one screen playable demo they made is now finished, and will be online next week for you to have a go at. In the meantime enjoy some sneak preview images!

Girls Make Games

We have started back with 2 of our Girls Make Games classes, Intermediate and Advanced.
Intermediate
Our Intermediate students have been working on a story for their game. It’s pleasingly bonkers.
We took some of the graphics the girls made last term (with help from Christina - https://twitter.com/SilkSutures) and asked the students to come up with a story based on them.

So far, the story goes something like this…
Sad Man is sad because he was supposed to be looking after his friend's pet frog, Sally, but he has misplaced her. This incident, regrettably, is enough to send Sad Man over the edge and push him to a life of crime. His next step is to kidnap the Queen (who happens to be a giant potato). This, understandably, upsets King Potato, who is driven so mad with rage that he transforms into Evil Potato and goes on a rampage smashing things up.
Sally (the missing frog) isn’t actually missing, but rather has just gone to her job. Where she works as a top detective. Did I mention Sally was a magic frog? No? Oh, well Sally can turn into a human at will. The way you do. Anyhoo - Sally has been called out to investigate the mysterious case of the missing King and Queen and the surprising appearance of an Evil Potato with a striking resemblance to said King.
Meanwhile, across town, Sad Man is not having a good time. Queen Potato is not turning out to be much fun. In fact she’s furious that she’s been kidnapped. Sad Man thinks hard, and using all his knowledge of women, decides that some makeup might cheer her up. In keeping with his new life of crime, he decides to steal some. Unfortunately for Sad Man, he decided to steal Vee’s makeup.

Vee is Sally’s assistant detective.
Vee persuades Sally to stop looking for the missing King and Queen (that can wait) and to help her find her makeup (much more important). Luckily enough, Sad Man is also A Bit Useless Man, and has dropped pieces of Vee’s makeup, leading all the way back to..his house!
Sally and Vee follow the trail, making sure to not be noticed by Sad Man, and find Queen Potato.
Sad Man is arrested by the very frog whose disappearance led to him adopting a life of crime, the news of Queen Potato’s rescue soothes Evil Potato and he turns back into King Potato, and Vee gets a bonus to buy more makeup.

Fin
At the girl’s request we will be working on the rampage first.

Advanced class

This term is slightly different, and the girls themselves are deciding what they want to learn. So far we have covered moving from one room / level / screen to another with a button click (for a start screen), dragging and dropping an object around the game screen with the mouse (for a jigsaw game) and most recently looking at how to adjust elements of a prewritten script to make a fun platformer. The girls can now fill a room with collectables, have their player collect them, and when they are all collected, move on to the next level.
Other advanced news -
Eirinn is trying and failing to draw a clown character that DOESN’T scare Katherine. Not possible. All clowns are scary.
When asked what they liked most about the class, about half the girls said ‘the free kit kats’.
This is not what I meant, nor does it look good on promotional material. Thx.

The Hub and Void
On Wednesday we had a fantastic afternoon in Void Gallery celebrating the completion of our ‘Make it Up!’ project.
You can read more about it, and play the game here - https://www.kippie.org.uk/make-it-up

I want to share with you some of the stories the young people themselves made up using the game because they are BRILLIANT.

Cards:
Magician, Being a fan of Justin Beiber, Snake, Angry, happy ever after

Mr Smith was a magician and owned a magic chocolate shop. He loved his little shop, and his favourite customer was Justin Beiber, who Mr Smith was a huge fan of. Once a week Justin Beiber would come into the shop to buy his favourite chocolate bar, a Mars bar, and Mr Smith looked forward to it greatly. The only thing in the world that was more important to Mr Smith than Justin Beiber was keeping his little shop nice and tidy. A place for everything and everything in its place!
One day, a new customer came into Mr Smith's shop. She was a snake called Sally Sock, and she loved Mars bars as well. Really loved them. She was busy gathering all the Mars bars from the shelves and putting them into her basket, when in walked Justin Beiber! They lock eyes. Justin stared at all the Mars bars in Sally’s basket, and the few Mars bars left on the shelf. Sally stared at the Mars bars left on the shelf. Suddenly they both BOLT towards the few remaining bars, and end up having a tussle, trying to grab the bars off the shelf, out of each other's hands and out of each other's baskets. This made Mr Smith angry. He tried to break up the fight - horrified that all his lovely stock was being thrown all over the place, but somehow he ended up being knocked into a big vat of his special sleepy hot chocolate powder. Justin and Sally rushed to pull him out, but it was too late, he was fast asleep.
Realising what they had done, Justin and Sally ran around the shop to look for an antidote. Working as a team, they first tried giving Mr Smith some nutty nougat, but that didn’t work. Then they tried Mr Smith’s fizzy lizzies, but still nothing! Finally, they see a jar of Pickled Lemon Sun Drops - super sour and super fizzy. They pop one in Mr Smith’s mouth and KABLAM! He jumps up and starts dancing the Macarena. He smiles and immediately bans both Justin Beiber and Sally Snake from ever coming back in his shop, and lives happily ever after!

Cards:
Caterpillar, swimming, shark, fiery, happy ever after

Mr James the caterpillar loves to swim. Every morning he goes to the sea for a swim, and it makes him feel happy. Unfortunately, none of Mr James’s caterpillar friends like to swim because they are all scared of the sea, so he has to go on his own. But he still does it everyday because it makes him feel good.
One morning he wiggles into the sea as usual, when he is suddenly face to face with a HUGE SHARK.
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHH screams Mr James and rapidly swims back to the shore.
After he gets over the shock, Mr James starts to feel annoyed. He’s been going swimming in that bit of sea every morning for as long as he can remember. He’s had to put up with all his friends telling him he was silly to go swimming in the sea, and that it was far too dangerous. And now it looks like they were right! How annoying! Mr James takes a deep breath to try and control his fiery temper. He’s not going to take this! He’s going to go have it out with the shark.
Mr James was a little worried that the shark might just eat him, so he sensibly finds a little rock pool near the edge of the sea to sit in, knowing there was no way the shark could reach him there.
‘Hello? Is there a shark here?’ Mr James calls out
‘HELLO’ came a bi booming voice, and the shark popped his head out of the water.
‘MY NAME IS THOMAS THE SHARK. YOU ARE A CATERPILLAR - WHAT ARE YOU DOING IN THE SEA????? CATERPILLARS CAN’T SWIM!’
‘Yes we can!’ Shouted Mr James. ‘It’s just that most of us are scared of the sea. But I’m not! Well, I wasn’t until I saw you. Are you going to eat me?’
‘OH NO’ said Thomas. ‘I NEVER EAT CATERPILLARS. I TRIED ONE ONCE AND IT WAS DISGUSTING.’
‘Excellent!’ Said Mr James, happily jumping into the sea beside Thomas.
From then on, Thomas and Mr James met every morning to go for a swim together, and they both lived happily ever after.


Games review with The Hub and Level 1
Our Level 1 students from the Hub had a ball reviewing Nickelodeon All Star Brawl.
There was lasagne throwing and leaping off buildings all in the name of research!
Many thanks to The Acorn Fund for supporting this.
Check it out here!