There Are Cows Everywhere Game Jam Showcase!

Well hey there, coders and parents! I hope you’re all feeling marvellous this week. Just last week we finished our most recent Game Jam (the second one of the summer!) which has been full to the brim with awesome submissions that we’ve been having a ton of fun playing through. Well done to everyone – you’ve endured the summer heat and made some masterpieces!

As a reminder, our Game Jams are a chance for members of The Code Zone to let their creativity and coding abilities run wild – we choose a base theme and some starter code, but after that, what ends up in their games are entirely their own ideas! What’s more, they can then choose to share their games with the rest of The Code Zone, who can then play their games, admire their hard work and creativity, and of course award them some XP points too. It’s a great way of getting members to try out all the coding knowledge they’ve learnt, while having a ton of fun in the process!

But the most important thing to know is that our theme this time was ‘There are Cows Everywhere’ – aka, our members have been challenged to make games that include a ton of… well, cows everywhere! Of course this isn’t a hard-line rule though; we love to see the different variations they’ve made on the theme too! Without further ado, let’s moooooooove onto the games, shall we? In no particular order:

Otis – Zonebot’s Cow-Code Catastrophe!

First up, we have a game from Otis! Otis absolutely smashed it out the park in this Game Jam, by building our beloved Zonebot into the story with an amazing intro cutscene. In the story of his game, our robotic friend is in their bedroom, enjoying a nice day of doing nothing (sounds great to me!) when unexpectedly, their laptop glitches with some sort of cow-related virus; and before you know it, THERE ARE COWS EVERYWHERE! We’re transported to the cow dimension, and the gameplay starts. Absolute cinema; brilliant job, Otis!!

Tobias – Cow Clicker!

Next, we’ve got a fantastic game from Tobias, packed full of features. Rather than use our base game this Game Jam, Tobias has completely reformed the whole game to be a clicker game, where we need to click the cow in the middle of the screen as many times as possible, using the points we gain from clicking to purchase new upgrades from a shop, that allow us to – you guessed it – click even more cows!! Tobias has clearly put a ton of effort into coding a very complex shop system, with a bunch of buttons, upgrades, and even achievements you can earn! I’m blown away by the details he’s put in – absolutely fantastic job, Tobias!

Fraser – There’s Mad Cows Everywhere!

Now we’re on to Fraser’s game, which is a super cool side-on defence game where we need to protect our house from a horde of rampaging mad cows! They’re dead set on eating all the grass in our garden, and we can’t let that happen.  We need to use our w and s keys to move up and down, and our mouse pointer to aim our special cow-blocking shield – which we need to use constantly, or else our character will end up flat as a pancake! Not only that, but there’s a ton of cool particle effects and even a boss battle you can experience… if you make it that far! Well done on your super challenging game, Fraser!

Zachary – A musical, marvellous masterpiece

Zachary’s game is next, and it’s absolutely fantastic – he’s shown his brilliant creative abilities and created a whole story in his game about a heroic cow named Rory, who has to go on an adventure to find his one true love, another cow called Grace! An amazing cutscene plays at the start of the game, with animations showing the predicament he ends up in; he’s lost her in the huge herd of cows everywhere around him. But what’s truly amazing about Zach’s game is that he’s got custom music playing in the background, perfectly crafted to sound like a cowboy ballad with lyrics at the bottom of the screen to boot. It’s truly brilliant, and makes for a very fun playing and listening experience – great job, Zach!

Tristan – CowBat!

And last but certainly not least, we have a game from Tristan! As the name of his game suggests, the main character is a bat, and we’ve got to dodge an onslaught of cows falling from the sky, gaining points the more of them we avoid. Just like in all games, we’re aiming to get as many points as possible, but Tristan has put a bit of a twist on things – every now and then, a milk bottle will fall from the sky, which will actually allow us to win the game when we grab it. Sounds great, right? But wait – if we grab it too early, our score won’t be very impressive! So we actually have to avoid it until we’re ready to declare ourselves the victors, which is a great idea. Tristan also cleverly designed a system where we can adjust the difficulty of the game – press the space bar to slow the cows down, or the enter key to speed them back up! This is awesome, Tristan, big well done!!

Phew! Those were amazing. Unfortunately, that’s all we have time for today - as usual, it was so hard to pick which games to showcase (there’s just so many great choices), and don’t worry if yours didn’t make it – we’ll do more showcases again soon, and yours could be on that one, who knows! Just keep up the hard work with your coding.

Remember that to play any of these games, you can click on the Game Jam tab and click on ‘past jams’ to view all the submissions for this Game Jam or any of the past ones, and even play the games that us mentors have made! Be sure to give your fellow coders an XP point too by clicking on the XP star icon.

We hope you enjoyed the last week of the Game Jam, and we’ll see you again soon!