Building a game with my son: day 2

This article is part of a series, see the first one here. As I mentioned in that first article, my son and I are building a game together, based on his ideas, and one that we plan on finishing or having it reasonably playable with 15 hours of work at a pace of 1.5 hours per day, and today we had our second session.

Yesterday, we had finished our session by planning what we wanted to achieve today. We had a basic level thrown together and our character moving around the screen and jumping, but there was a lot more to achieve. We wanted to:

• Stop the character falling off the sides of the screen
• Make our background and sky not move with the camera, or move with parallax effect
• Consider making the floor never-ending
• Add obstacles and artefacts for the character to jump on to
• And constrain the camera to the scene as yesterday we left it always centred in the character which meant we could see "outside the world"

I was determined to let my son "drive" today as much as possible, despite some difficult tasks, and we started by trying to stop the character from falling off the sides of the screen where our floor ended. It is funny how our minds work, I immediately thought of adding some code to the character that would stop it moving after certain positions, but my son simply thought that we could add walls to the beginning and end of our scene and, like we did with the floor, enable collision detection for the walls. I thought that was very clever and a much simpler solution than mine, so I let him do that. Once he had positioned the walls and tested to see if the character could jump over them, making adjustments, I showed him how we could stop rendering the wall even though it was still there, which made them invisible. A big green tick on the first task.

The next two tasks were the parallax camera for the background and possibly making the floor endless, but I dismissed those as I knew those would have to be mostly done by me, so having explained that to my son, he agreed and we moved on to adding obstacles and artefacts to the scene, something he could also do by himself using the free resources we had downloaded the previous day. I told him these were not going to be at their final position as we just wanted every game element on the screen so we could make them work logically so that eventually we can move on to actual level design.

I was surprised that he was capable of letting go of his desire for immediate perfection and that he placed enough elements on the screen that we would have a good variety to test our future logic with, but did not get precious about where they were. That is not something easy for an 8-year-old! At least not for my 8-year-old. :)

Finally, we moved on to the last task in our ambitious plan, which was to constrain the camera to the scene. That was something that required coding, but again my son surprised me with his clear understanding of what needed to be done: once the character reached a certain point in the scene, near the beginning or the end, we had to stop the camera following him. It was simple to code and in no time we had it working.

Since we still had 20 minutes left, I suggested we tried another task. You see, this game will require the character to pick these "balls" while he is jumping, that are sort of like coins, but they change the character's ability, and there are 3 types of balls. So my son added the balls to the scene, and we had just enough time to add the code to make the balls disappear when the character touched them. Our time was up but we spent an extra 5 minutes planning the tasks for tomorrow, which will be very exciting!

Tomorrow we will mostly be dealing with state detection, that is, adding "lives" to the character and making it lose them in certain conditions. I am still optimistic, and this has been a great experience, and I have learned so much already! How children are incredibly creative and how they can approach complex problems from different directions and solve them in unexpected ways; how they can change their expectations and move forward quickly when the objective is exciting enough; and how to let go of my way of doing things, to find out that simpler ways work and are probably enough!

I am looking forward to tomorrow's session, so please stay tuned.

UPDATE: Day 3 is here.