At the start of the year I decided to enter another game dev competition but this time with a more serious theme behind it. The Serious Games Showcase and Challenge Europe is a competition based around the learning and training through gameplay and so I started to put together an entry based around one of my hobbies, amateur radio.
The idea for the game was a simple one, you have to complete the puzzles in order to bring an old radio back online before transmitting your final message. I was also going to use this as an education tool to give some of my pupils an insight into the game development process. It was all built in Scratch as this would allow my pupils who have had little exposure to coding to still be involved. This game really works Scratch hard as I got it to track the ISS and lunar cycles in real time as part of the game.
After months of developing and involving my various classes in the testing and refining process, I put together a little prop to showcase it but also put together a little promotional show reel (above). It made the final!
Set up for the final started at the beginning of the week at an event in Bristol. I took my son along to help set up and to test that everything was working. He found a bit of a bug in one of the areas of the game that had never appeared before, so there was a bit of frantically patching ahead of the final assessment.
The grand prize was a trip to Orlando to attend the huge Serious Games event later in the year. That prize went to a really deserving game that trained dental assistants. I met some lovely people from the dev community as well as the awesome finalists from the UK, US and Germany. What I found most interesting was how people could also see the huge potential a project like my game could have in promoting creative coding within schools and I'm really looking forward to discussing these ideas further to see where they lead.
I had to also give a talk on the value of gamification and creative coding in schools, which allowed me to tell the story of how my game came to be and all my amazing pupils who were involved along the way. I did win one category through, the Student Choice award, something that I was extremely flattered to be awarded.
I have always thought the mechanical fortune teller machines where a thing of wonder and I've always wondered about making one myself. I have previously experimented with making a proof of concept miniature version here but as I had some spare time on my hands I decided to scale up to a full sized cabinet. I started by rescuing an old wardrobe that was skipped and used the panels to put together the bottom half of the cabinet. The intention is to have the bottom half collecting the money and dispensing fortune cards, with the top half house Zoltar in a framed enclosure. I removed the insides of the miniature fortune teller and made sure they still work. A friend of mine gave me a nice 1d coin panel and I made sure that this worked with the existing coin acceptor. The brains of Zoltar runs off a simple Microbit . I love these little programmable boards, they're easy to use as well as cheap and are perfect for projects like this. The code is surprisingly simple too. The Microbi...
Quantum Leap was an obsession of mine during the 90s and I'm still a huge fan of the show even now. As we'll be off to another comic con shortly, I wanted to try and make another prop to take along to the even and the Ziggy handheld that featured in the original series seemed a great ideas as it would be challenging to make but would be easy to carry around with me on the day. The short video below details how it was made with downloadable resources further down this page. The first thing I did was to pull up some reference material in the form of screenshots that clearly shows the handheld. There are also props that you can buy and the images they had on the various websites were a lot more detailed. From here I was able to build a simple model from within Tinkercad . I made sure I included the main blocks of the design and made up the more smaller components. I thought if I could achieve the general look and outline of the handheld, then it will be easily recognisable. I want...
My son and I built a mini tabletop arcade machine. As luck would have it, the width of an old wooden IKEA drawer is the same width as a USB NES controller. It’s nice when things fit like that. The brains of the operation sits a small Raspberry Pi Zero running Retropie . Even without a knowledge of coding, setting up a retro gaming system using Retropie is really simple and I would definitely recommend giving it a try if you’re toying with the idea. Why stop there? Using the same ingredients you can then go on to build more interesting and creative gaming projects. One of my favourites has to be the retro gaming picture frame that I build a couple of years ago for an event.
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