As part of her government plan as class leader, Gaby, my 6 y/o daughter promised she would take a “video game expert” to her class during her tenure. We couldn’t find one so it ended up being just me.
She had some big plans to create a videogame about exploring and escaping from an Island; in her initial design, you’d have to explore the island looking for gems, then completing “activities” at a town in the island in order to get wood and iron you would use to craft the tools you needed to eventually find the secret sword and face the dragon that was guarding the mystic gem that was needed to escape. (more or less, I’m not spoiling the full experience)
We had to cut some corners, but we were finally able to pack a vertical slice of the game made in Unity2D.
I want to share a bit about the experience of very quickly building a simple game, as well as talking to these kids (6-7 years old), it may come in handy for anyone having to address a similar audience about gamedev. I am no expert of course.
I started by asking them who liked videogames, unsurprisingly, everybody did, and most of them wanted to make games as well! I also asked them what were their favorite games, just to have them participate and also guide the following topics. Roblox, Fortnite, Mario Kart, and Adopt Me, were some of the mentions. In here I put some comments about the positive aspects of video games as learning tools but also that they need to pick games according to their age and make sure not to interact with strangers in social games.
Moving on into making video games, I told them it was something that required a lot of discipline, dedication and teamwork, and discussed with them the different roles associated with a game project (art, programming, music, etc.), and how you have to put a lot of passion in order to become really good in one of them so you can contribute the most in a project.
Some of them asked how I learned to make videogames, I told them it was a long journey (I used the timeline at slashie.net to show them how it goes back to 1996), and that I also met a lot of friends along all these years, and learned to work with them in the different roles.
We then went on to play Kahoot, the quiz-competition online game, a favorite of my daughter. I was able to hastily prepare the quiz that same morning, it worked flawlessly. The kids really enjoyed it, I covered different topics including basic math and geography, but also Pokémon and a little bit of Pokémon as well.
Finally, I showed the kids the game we made; we used Unity so I just showed them the loaded assets, how everything was included into the game project and how you could build scenes where you put everything together. The idea was for them to have an idea of what tools were used to make games, and again I pointed out how different disciplines como together.
We even managed to include some characters that the winners of the Kahoot contest drew quickly on paper, so they loved seeing their creations on the game so quickly.
Unity was a great help to put together the game; initially I had thought on using Google’s awesome Jerry Lawson Doodle, but in the end I just replicated some of its concepts in Unity and was able to have much more flexibility.
The first part of the process for this was to have Gaby draw the maps with colored pencils, scan them, process them a bit in GIMP (contrast/cleanup) and then drop them into the scene, and put some EdgeColliders around the walkable areas.
After dropping a very simple keyboard based character controller, I could walk in the map freely, but then it was time to add navigation and make the script that Gaby had designed a reality.
I think the most notorious work was the small framework built around for the interactivity and navigation; this included Portals, which could be used to transport the player quickly between locations, PickableObjects which allow objects to be added to inventory and removed from the map when the player touches them, and Barriers which require having an object on inventory in order to pass. Just these three type of objects were enough to model the game. I wonder if they could be useful as a simple framework, I could clean them up a bit and put them in the store with some documentation, could some in handy for simple Adventure-style games.
Kuchi 0.1 is just a sample of the full game, which will include several islands to explore as well as improved visuals; keep an eye out for the next version which should come out in a couple of years!
Slashie's Gamedev Adventures 