Coding: More Than Just Gaming!

Here at The Code Zone it is no secret that we love to play games. Our whole philosophy of helping children how to code is to learn through play! However that doesn't just mean that all we do here is code power-ups, boss fights and levelling up mechanics. We also inspire the more visual and creative side of our members through showing them how to design characters, write stories, make opening sequences and learn how to animate their own cutscenes.

This is done not only in clubs with the support and coding knowledge of the mentors, but also through various coding skills on our member's dashboard. So in celebration of animation and all things fun and visual, here are some amazing things that you can create in our clubs. 

Character Animation

Our members love making the weekly games their own - whether that's inserting their favourite cartoon or gaming character or designing something completely from fresh. In Scratch, our members are taught how to draw using their mouse whilst also learning how to understand the different colours, sizes and types of images there are such as a vector and a bitmap. In MakeCode, we use a Pixelart style which our members love to practice with to create a retro style to their games whilst working within a certain size range.

Animation really brings these drawn characters to life and within all of the coding languages and gaming engines we use, animation is easily do-able. For example, within Scratch simple by adding multiple costumes to a sprite and putting a change costume block within a forever loop, our members can give the illusion of a flip book to their sprite which makes the animation come alive! In MakeCode, there is a whole series of blocks and loops dedicated to creating animation as well as some premade animations within the asset library which are easily customisable. 

Scrolling Backgrounds

Movement in backgrounds is actually one of our favourite Guided Hacks and our members love seeing them pop up in their games. In MakeCode and Python, this is executed by creating large backgrounds which are bigger than the screen and writing code for the camera to follow the sprite which gives the background fluidity when the character moves. In Scratch, to create a scrolling background our members need to make the Background move on the x-axis whilst also creating a duplicate clone which spawns whenever one of the background reaches a certain point on the screen. What is really great and interesting about this method is that the sprites don't actually move themselves, only the background but it gives the illusion of the movement - how neat!

We can also switch backgrounds by having if-statements which checks if a certain condition is met; for example if we have a character walk to a door we can have some overlap scripts which triggers when the character is near that door which can change the background to something else as a way to show they've entered a new area. 

Opening Cutscenes

When a member gets confident with animating characters and sprites, the natural next step is to animate a whole opening sequence! This can either be in the form of a story or maybe even an interactive opening menu. In any of the coding languages and engines, this is all done by ensuring the timings and sequences of each function called and executed. For example, your main character may want to have a speech at the beginning of the game so you must ensure that none of the gameplay code is being called during this moment so it doesn't overlap. For MakeCode and Python, this is done by ensuring that each function is called in the correct order, one after the other, whereas in Scratch we use broadcast blocks which you can add at the end of a coding script to then activate another script in the correct sequence. 

So whether your child wants to get into character design, animation or gameplay mechanics our Game Dev Club has everything they need or to learn! Get in touch with one of our STEM-certified Mentors for a FREE taster session in one of our clubs. We'll see you there!