video game assignment

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Course info, instructors.

• Philip B. Tan

Departments

• Comparative Media Studies/Writing

As Taught In

• Game Design
• Media Studies

Learning Resource Types

Study materials.

Readings are taken from the course text and other sources, listed by session in the table below. Lab sessions also include a list of games that may be played in class. All assignments must be turned in at the beginning of class.

[CGD] = Brathwaite, Brenda, and Ian Schreiber. Challenges for Game Designers: Non-Digital Exercises for Video Game Designers . Boston, MA: Charles River Media/Course Technology, 2009. ISBN: 9781584505808.

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How to write a video game story

I took a game writing course. Here’s what I learned

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My first attempt at writing a video game script begins with the socialist journalist and activist Marina Ginestà, a remarkable woman who died five years ago, at the age of 94.

Although she lived an eventful life, she’s most famous for a photograph taken of her when she was 17 years old, standing on the rooftop of a Barcelona hotel, a rifle slung over her shoulder. It’s one of the most arresting images of the Spanish Civil War, in which young, idealistic Europeans like Ginestà fought for democracy, against a coalition of fascists and aristocrats.

I’m going to use that photograph as the first building block of my game. You see, I’ve signed onto an online course called Story for Video Games , a six-session investigation of interactive narrative. By the end of the course, I hope to have created a fully fleshed story for a game. There’s no coding or art. I only have to write.

The course is run by John Yorke, the author of Into the Woods , a book on how stories work. He also runs courses on writing novels, plays, movie scripts, and TV dramas. He’s spent most of his career in British television, holding senior roles on the BBC’s most popular production, the rollicking soap opera EastEnders .

Yorke tells me that games pose a particular challenge because of their interactivity, and their reliance on spectacular visual effects.

“In games, the writing often takes second place to design and technology,” he says. “If developers invest more in the writing, in the very best screenwriters, that’s going to take them to the next level.”

Yorke says he plays “AAA, blockbuster games, when I can find the time.” He is assisted by experts in gaming, including Caroline Marchal, CEO of studio Interior Night, which is currently working on a narrative game for Sega. She formerly worked at Quantic Dream, where she was lead game designer for Beyond: Two Souls . Quantic Dream is arguably the world’s most ambitious studio when it comes to interactive narratives and character-driven gaming, seen in its most recent title, 2018’s Detroit: Become Human , which has sold 2 million copies.

“The big difference between movies or novels and video games is that, because they’re interactive, the audience is actually part of the experience in a way other media doesn’t offer,” she says. “So the journey they’re going through is the same as that of the protagonist. That creates challenges as well as opportunities.”

The session’s first exercise is to create a protagonist. Yorke asks that I mention the game’s genre in my written presentation, but he’s much more interested in the character at the center of my game than in the way the game plays. He says games are beginning to escape a long history of character cliches and stereotypes, and he’s looking for his students’ work to reflect that progress.

“I’ve seen a lot of really basic, James Bond-level characterizations in games,” he says. “It’s done out of a desire for safety. The games companies think that’s the easiest person for players to empathize with. But I think they’re wrong. That’s not how empathy really works. Empathy is about finding something inside a character that’s flawed and damaged; that you understand.”

Yorke and Marchal’s introduction to the course states their belief that today’s games should focus as much on stories as on activities. They point toward the recent success of narrative games in which protagonists (and antagonists) have displayed more depth and human resonance than in years gone by. Their gallery of examples includes The Last of Us , Her Story , Overwatch , and Reigns .

I want to find out if they’re right. Is character really as important in a game as it is in a novel or a play? So I’m going to write my story.

Creating stories

There’s one snag. I’ve been writing about games for decades. I’m deeply interested in how they work and how they affect me. But I have never in my life felt the least inclination to actually make one.

It’s not that I’m averse to telling stories. I’ve written two novels , so theoretically, I ought to at least be curious about writing a story-based game. But in the realms of fiction, I’ve always cared more about why people do the things that they do, than on what they actually do. My novels include few action sequences. The stories focus mainly on dialogue and relationships. This is how novels work. But it’s not how games work.

Most narrative-heavy games, like Telltale’s story adventures, are constantly introducing action elements that draw focus away from emotional problems and toward practical and physical puzzles. But we’re beginning to see exceptions, such as Florence and My Child Lebensborn — both of which were ranked in Polygon’s top 50 games of last year — which focus almost entirely on story and resonance.

Yorke’s course is attractive to me because it’s dedicated to the curious idea that novels and games are the same, at least insofar as how they allow us to inhabit other people.

”All stories are forged from the same template,” he says. “What that template is and why we need to follow it is the subject of this course.”

Traditionally, games have mostly been dedicated to inhabiting the physicality of their characters. Mario jumps. Solid Snake sneaks. Lara climbs. Their personalities and backstories are sideshows, or thin marketing exercises. The characters lack substance. Their motivations are arcane.

Marchal points toward woeful completion rates for many single-player campaigns. “If you look at the statistics for single-player games, the majority of players do not finish them. That’s a storytelling problem,” she says. Raptr estimated that only one in 10 players completed the final mission in the original Red Dead Redemption (which has, admittedly, a very long campaign).

She argues that, in many big-budget action-adventures, players lose interest in the mechanics, but a good story would pull them forward. Players want to care about the game’s characters and about the most important element of any story: What happens next?

“There’s a lot we can learn from the ways stories have been crafted for centuries, which can then be crafted to work with just about any kind of game, even if it doesn’t seem to fit any kind of traditional linear model,” she says.

To fix this problem, Marchal argues that game designers must rise to the challenge of increasing narrative complexity. Technology today — animation, artificial intelligence, dynamic narrative systems — allows for deeper characters than in the past. We can all agree that Lara Croft is a more complicated and interesting person than she was 25 years ago. Tomb Raider’s recent three-game reboot was built around the story of Croft’s growth as a character.

As players become more demanding and diverse, they desire more believable, flawed, identifiable characters. In his introduction to the course, Yorke points out that game stories and linear stories fit the same patterns, but that they are not the same thing. They require specific approaches. “Writing for a linear medium is difficult,” he says. “Writing for games is even harder. There are very specific challenges and pitfalls to overcome. The task gets even more complex when you consider that narrative needs vary greatly from one game genre to another.”

I’m interested in writing about people and emotions. So it feels like I ought to be able to explore my ideas through the medium of games. At least, I want to find out if it’s possible. I know my game is never going to get made. I just want to see how far I am able to run with Yorke’s ideas.

And so, my game character comes to life.

Murderous communist

Olivia Espinoza is a woman in her early 20s. She dresses in factory-issue clothing or in dark, bohemian garb. She lives in Paris, in 1942, under Nazi occupation. She is a communist, a political idealist who works for the French Resistance. She is also a cold-eyed assassin.

I am required to supply some sort of visual aid to my character. Although Olivia is older than Marina Ginestà is in her photograph, the image sums her up nicely.

My game could be a shooter, or action-adventure. I’m interested in a human adventure, like A Case of Distrust , a noirish game I admire greatly, in which dialogue trees and visual puzzles lead the player toward the resolution of a mystery.

I want to see Olivia move through wartime Paris, engaging in awesome conversations with Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre, with collaborators and resistance fighters. I want to see her cope with encountering Jewish parents, hiding from the round-ups.

My desire to model Olivia’s story on a niche game turns out to be a mistake. When I present Olivia, my tutors say nice, encouraging things to me. But they’re confused about what she’ll actually be doing in the game, and they want to hear more about her motivations.

They’re not familiar with A Case of Distrust, so I take the easy option and add $100 million to my imaginary development budget. It’s going to be a AAA extravaganza, more like The Last of Us .

But it’s important to me that this isn’t another game about killing people. I want to place severe restrictions on Olivia, so she can’t just run around Paris shooting Nazis. In my game, it’s going to be just as difficult to kill Nazis as it would have been in wartime Paris.

Of course, the game is all in my head, so I have unlimited access to the best coders, animators, and financial backers in the universe. But I also have tutors, and they warn me that my game must be created within the realms of the practically possible and the commercially viable.

They are kind enough to leave me with just enough wiggle room to ignore their guidance. I figure, if I’ve been given this opportunity to write my game, I’m not going to fret about what some bean counter at EA or Activision might think about it.

I understand, of course, that in the real world, my idea would have zero chance of attracting funding. It’s fine. I’m here to find out how interactive stories work. I already know how the game industry works.

Narrative arcs

Story in games can sometimes create an inherent friction between the writer’s ambitions, the designer’s goals, and the player’s desires.

Doom co-creator John Carmack once said , “Story in a game is like story in a porn movie: it’s expected to be there, but it’s not that important.” Back in 1993 , Doom relied on its superb game design and graphical innovations to capture the imaginations of players.

But the world has moved on. Years later, the Doom of 2016 comes with a big narrative element that falls broadly into the same three-act pattern of a classic movie or play.

The unnamed playable character is faced with the challenge of closing a portal to hell. He resolves a series of crises, generally manifesting as hordes of monsters. He overcomes an antagonist and resolves the initial challenge. It’s true that he displays little in the way of personality — certainly, he’s no Hamlet — but he interacts with people who have motivations and flaws in a way that we do not see in the original game.

Overwatch is one of the most successful shooting games in the world, a modern successor of sorts to Doom . It is filled with characters like Tracer, D.Va, and Hanzo, whose backstories and personalities add significantly to the game’s appeal.

Like many creative writing tutors, Yorke argues that all great characters come with three things. They have to want something. They have to need something. And they have to demonstrate a flaw that the story addresses.

So I set to work on Olivia’s wants, needs, and flaws.

She is tasked by her resistance bosses with assassinating the Nazi chief of police in his fortified lair. What she wants is to complete her mission.

But she’s unhappy. She’s spent her life killing people, and yet finds no satisfaction, or reward, in her work. She needs to break free from her life of violence, while still staying true to her desire to defeat the Nazis and create a better world.

Olivia’s flaw is that she’s a dogmatic person who’s unable to understand her own despair. From a young age, she’s gained immense skills as a warrior, but in achieving excellence as an assassin, she’s denied herself basic humanity.

Inciting incidents

The course follows a pattern of investigation, followed by creativity, and then analysis. Each week, the students — there are about a dozen of us — watch YouTube clips, play games, and read story synopses from a variety of games. We offer perspectives on what we believe works well, and what doesn’t.

We look at motivations, antagonists, and inciting incidents, studying games as varied as Candy Crush , Ico , Evolve , The Crew , and Red Dead Redemption .

One element of game design that fascinates Yorke is the relationship between the player and the main character.

“There’s a contradiction between the agency a player has, and how that conflicts and contrasts with the desires of the game’s writer,” he says. “How you marry those two things together is difficult, but also an incredible opportunity, if you get it right.”

Some games, like multiplayer worlds, present “blank slate” characters that are built by the player, who fills in the blanks. But these stories cleave to narrative models based on heroes, villains, an inciting incident, crisis, and resolution. Resolution can come in the form of completing a mission or leveling up or acquiring a sword. These games are cast as “open-world” or as “sandboxes,” but they are essentially amalgamations of fairy tales, tied together with an overarching story.

I work my way through these examples, offering notes when required. My homework is evaluated by Yorke, Marchal, various tutors, and other students. Feedback is always delivered in a way that’s constructive and useful.

We move on to studying the classic three-act structure of stories, and how such a notion fits with games. I immerse myself in the detailed story arcs of Inside and Life is Strange .

The course addresses arguments about whether or not games, by being interactive, are fundamentally separate from linear forms. We look at mainstream literature and entertainment, from Macbeth to Jaws , drawing comparisons with games. We learn how linear structures work in the context of games, emphasizing how games bend and morph these structures in ways that are still being investigated by writers.

Redemption and rejection

I return to my project and try to apply what I’ve learned.

Yorke says it’s useful to be able to state a story’s theme in one word. My story about Olivia focuses on redemption. It’s about her relationship with deadly violence. The warrior-to-pacifist transformation has been told many times before, but rarely in the context of a video game.

Emerging pacifism throws up interesting challenges in the context of a game. I find myself struggling to find things for the player to do, while Olivia works through her journey. Again and again, my tutors try to correct my habit of longish dialogue tree sessions. I keep at it, honing my scenes to give the player as much agency and illusion of choice as possible.

Long story short, Olivia’s mission to take out the evil cop goes awry, and she accidentally kills the cop’s mistress. During her escape from the police station, Olivia kills two guards who get in her way. They are guarding a West African nun, who is being interrogated about the location of missing Jewish orphans. This is the inciting incident.

The nun knows an opportunity when she sees one. She wants Olivia to arrange for the escape of these orphans. The plan provides a short-term refuge for Olivia, so she agrees. But the nun has one stipulation. She asks that Olivia kill no more people during this mission. The nun sternly assures Olivia that while she is grateful to be free, the deaths of the soldiers are a stain on her own religious beliefs and eternal conscience.

This causes a friction between the two women, and within Olivia. Resolving this friction — the justification of violence as a means to an end — is where we encounter Olivia’s need. It also creates a challenge for the player throughout the game. Killing people will solve immediate problems, but will endanger the children. Stealth — which I have always loved playing — will be a core activity in my game.

As the game progresses, Olivia and the nun travel across Paris, evading patrols. They survive a series of dangerous encounters that allow us to explore cool Parisian locations, often converted for quasi-military purposes due to the war.

Missions often create practical problems that illustrate the pros and cons of the women’s competing ideologies. Pacifism is hard. It can also be dangerous and, in this setting, possibly self-defeating.

The gameplay structure is a little like that of A Way Out , which makes use of a variety of devices to tell a story about a prison break, and to explore the relationship between two very different convicts.

My dialogue tasks are heavily influenced by Mike Bithell’s superb work in Subsurface Circular , in which characters are revealed through conversations that also progress the plot. Olivia and the nun argue with one another while the story moves forward. In turn, the player is presented with provocative arguments, and a little levity, as the two women buddy up.

Olivia is forged by violence. The nun is heavily influenced by origin Christianity, and by the ancient traditions of her upbringing. In time, they will both be forced to confront their own inconsistencies because (of course) nothing is as simple as it seems, most especially to ideologues.

When he reviews my story, Yorke suggests that I find a way to physically manifest this exchange of ideas. So I have the nun present Olivia with a necklace: an enamel tortoise charm. In her home country, the tortoise represents peace.

This reminds me of a lesson about writing, one that I’ve always struggled with. Physically, writing is the act of stringing words together. The production is text. But weaving words is barely the point. Writers must think in terms of images, because that’s what the reader “sees” when they’re reading.

I’m a person who thinks in the language of words. It’s difficult for me to construct images and then write about them. I do it the other way around. This is a problem.

But if I want to write a game, even this leap, from words to images, is not enough. Game writers have to go farther.

Stories and history

A few weeks into the course and it’s impossible for me to play games without thinking about story. I play Red Dead Redemption 2 and Tetris Effect . The first is chock-full of characters and stories. The second has almost no story at all, but incorporates imagery that suggests narrative forms, such as discovery and redemption.

The dichotomy of story and not-story is at the center of gaming history. In the early days of games, those beeping, menacing Space Invaders arrived without any apparent motivation, inner conflict, or backup plan. We just shot them, and they shot us, and everyone was happy. The action game was born.

At the same time, text adventures appeared — Zork , The Hobbit , A Mind Forever Voyaging — that were wholly stories, with characters, motivation, flaws, and plot twists. They were smart, provocative, and commercially marginal.

Over the next three decades, these entirely different forms came together, and action games began to include narrative elements. Role-playing adventures, the descendants of those text adventures, became action-oriented exercises, interspersing killing and fighting with cutscenes or walking conversations between characters.

Commercial considerations and marketing drove the embrace of narrative and character. Sonic the Hedgehog was born from Sega’s desire to show off the Genesis’ ability to render fast-moving action. The company wanted a mascot who could compete and contrast with Nintendo’s Mario. Sonic’s main attributes were speed and a cocky, anti-establishment attitude.

This naked branding fed into comics and cartoons, as the character’s popularity exploded. But Sonic has always been trapped inside the mundane ambitions of his creators, and has never evolved into anything more than a funny mascot. (I accept that not everyone will agree with this view.)

Throughout the ’90s, stories became a creative consideration. Like all human beings, game developers had been brought up enjoying stories, and wanted to add gravitas and drama to their work.

But game developers were often better at coding than they were at telling stories. They made their games, and then they grafted on some hackneyed version of Lord of the Rings or Star Trek. A few games managed to stand out because of their devotion to story and to mythology, such as the Final Fantasy series.

Game publishers took note. Companies hired writers, usually to package up gameplay and art assets. Spinoff novels pulled convoluted series like Halo and Assassin’s Creed into some semblance of narrative form. Missions were cast as mini-stories, adding up to a baffling whole in which a princess was saved, a bomb deactivated, a tyrant deposed.

Critics began to write about games as stories, lambasting certain games for their ludonarrative dissonance in which the player’s actions are at odds with the personality or the aspirations of the on-screen character.

Big-budget games began to appear with more believable and compelling stories. BioShock, Mass Effect and Dragon Age explored the meaning of interactive stories, layering their narratives with provocative ideas about agency and heroism. They helped to establish games as fully rounded narrative experiences. Games now compete directly with the rest of the entertainment business, and must present themselves as coherent tales, in the same way as blockbuster movies. Many of the most highly prized games are seen as writerly endeavors.

The Witcher series is literally based on fantasy novels. The big games of 2018, like Red Dead Redemption 2 , Assassin’s Creed Odyssey and Shadow of the Tomb Raider , all began life as stories about characters, not as tech demos in search of drama.

These days, game producers are more likely to view writers as central to big game projects. In press interviews, development team leaders like The Last of Us’ Neil Druckmann and Red Dead Redemption’s Dan Houser speak about themselves primarily as writers, and secondarily as producers or directors. When Square Enix rebooted Tomb Raider, it sent out its writer Rhianna Pratchett as a prime spokesperson. In interviews, she talked about Lara as a person, not as an amalgamation of polygons designed to deliver kicks to the player.

Diverse bunch

My tutors press me to tighten my story. They send me notes asking for more clarity, more interactivity, more drama, and more fun. What they really want, I divine, is more action. They poke at each scene. I rewrite. My game improves.

My fellow students are facing the same process. We chat with one another via forums. They are a diverse bunch of men and women from various countries, a mixture of mainstream writers who want to learn about games and game developers who want to learn about writing. The course costs around $1,600, and takes up maybe half a day per week for seven weeks.

Most of us have full-time jobs. So the only mandatory exercise is the writing of the game story; all the others are optional. It’s easygoing and good fun.

I’m fascinated by the diversity of the other students’ games and stories. One action-RPG tells the tale of a soldier’s lost pet. Another is a racing game about a group of cartoon couriers. One game follows the romantic adventures of a woman who does not conform to standard beauty ideals. Another takes on the god game genre, and delves into the Almighty’s personal relationship with life creation.

These writers are looking at ways to polish up their resumes or even to launch their own indie projects.

In the last 10 years, we’ve seen a remarkable growth of indie games with powerful stories and memorable characters. Among them are some of my favorite games ever, including Tacoma , Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture , Rakuen , Blackwood Crossing , Orwell , and Virginia .

Action games are wonderful, but we all occasionally (or often) want something else. We want games to make us feel the way the best movies and books make us feel. And games are now providing that. It’s amazing that, only a decade ago, “ can games make you cry? ” was a genuinely interesting question. Now, who among us has not shed a tear at a game story?

Final exercise

For the final exercise, we must present our game stories, complete with descriptions of fully interactive elements. In my story, Olivia and the nun both make accommodations with one another’s beliefs, in order to save each other and to rescue the children. Olivia encounters the chief of police. The player decides if he lives or dies.

The nun falls into the hands of the Nazis. Olivia breaks into the Nazi compound, but when she finds the nun, Olivia discovers that she has been tortured beyond any possibility of escape. The nun begs to be spared further torture and her inevitable confession. She must die in order for the children to live. The nun sacrifices her own beliefs in the sanctity of life, while Olivia sacrifices her warrior self. The last person Olivia will ever kill is the nun (again, this is a player choice).

The tortoise “peace” necklace makes its reappearance in the final scene, offering Olivia a practical strategy for shepherding the children past Nazi guards, and onto a waiting boat bound for Britain.

In the final scene, we see her on a Normandy beach, gazing out across the English Channel. She will win the war, but she will kill no more. Her want, need, and flaw have been resolved.

Useful lessons

I’ve learned a ton of storytelling tips and techniques that shape the story, that add to its most intense beats, and that create an ending that feels satisfying and whole, at least to me. I feel the class has made me a better writer, and it’s made me understand game design more fully.

I’ve also learned to further appreciate how games are taking basic theories about story and subverting them in the name of fun and interactivity. When I play Reigns: Game of Thrones , I’m struck by how cleverly each character, each quest, and each decision follows a pattern of inciting incident, crisis, and resolution (though not always in that order).

Few games can (or should) blindly follow a three-act shape. But understanding form is how artists learn to subvert and surprise. This is the value of the course.

The biggest lesson is that writers of games aren’t merely storytellers; they are kinetic designers. Like all writers, they must create words by conjuring imagery. But they must also operate in the realm of action. The story is about the characters, of course. It’s also about what the player sees. But, most importantly, it’s about what the player does in the context of the narrative. Marrying character, action, and player together is the trick. This requires three-dimensional thinking that I now know for certain is a tough skill to master. My admiration for good game writers increases.

I still have no plans to make a game, but I’ll write up Olivia as a short story for my weekly fiction writers group. She exists in the world now. She and the nun have taught me something about what it means to be a person.

I hope my fellow students will find jobs, or project backers, and will bring their ideas into the world. That would make for the sort of narrative resolution Yorke would enjoy.

Make Your Own Video Game for Kids!

• How to Teach Variables to Kids
• Python for Kids: A Beginner’s Guide to Learning Programming with Python

Kids love to play video games. That much is obvious. But wouldn’t it be cool if they could make their screen time less passive and more productive? With Tynker, they can. By learning to code their own games, kids become creators instead of just consumers. And not only will they be having fun, but programming video games has proven to accelerate kids’ academics in math, science and reading, while giving them a skill that will open up countless future job opportunities.

At Tynker, kids and teens of all ages and skill levels can video game development with programming activities, built-in tutorials, online support, coding puzzles , mini-games, and more. So let’s learn more about making your own games for kids.

How to Make Easy Games for Kids?

Kids can make their own video games with coding platforms designed for kids! Children can use user-friendly game development tools like Scratch , Tynker , and GameMaker to build their own video games. These platforms are designed to be accessible and suitable for all skill levels, making it easy for kids to learn programming and game design without feeling overwhelmed

Children can develop their creativity, problem-solving, and critical thinking skills through engaging tutorials and interactive interfaces as they make games. As they gain experience, kids can graduate into more advanced video game coding tools like Unity or Unreal Engine to create increasingly sophisticated games.

Collaborating with others, either online or in-person, can further enhance their learning and foster teamwork. When encouraged to “build your own video game,” children have fun and develop a valuable skill set that can translate into future opportunities within the growing gaming industry. Plus they experience the pride that goeas along with being able to say, “I know how to create my own video game.”

Where to Begin When Your Child Wants to Create a Video Game?

If your child is interested in creating a video game, start by researching age-appropriate game maker online platforms like Scratch , Tynker , or Kodu , which are designed to be accessible and engaging for young learners. Please encourage your child to explore tutorials, examples, and community projects to familiarize themselves with the platform and gather inspiration. Next, help them brainstorm and plan their game concept, including characters, storyline, and game mechanics. As they develop their game, provide support and encouragement and celebrate their progress. Encourage collaboration with friends or online communities to enhance learning and teamwork.

What is the Easiest Game to Code for Kids?

One of the easiest games for kids to code is a block coding game using Tynker. Tynker is a fantastic platform designed specifically for young learners who are new to coding. It utilizes a block-based coding system, which means that instead of typing out complex code, kids can use colorful blocks that snap together like puzzle pieces. This makes coding accessible and fun for children, as they can drag and drop blocks to create their own games, characters, and interactive stories. With Tynker, kids can explore their creativity, learn coding fundamentals, and see their ideas come to life in the form of fun and engaging games. Whether it’s designing a maze, creating a character that jumps, or making a simple storytelling game, Tynker provides a supportive environment for kids to embark on their coding journey while having a blast along the way.

5 Great Reasons to Make Video Games with Tynker

Empower your kids to make their own games paving the way for endless creativity and fun. Experience the thrill of making your own video games for free, and watch as your children unlock their true potential with Tynker.

• Award-Winning Platform – Over 600 hours of unique content.
• Self-Guided – Your child will make games on their own, at their own pace.
• Support – Step-by-step instructions, how-to video guides, and online classes.
• All Ages – From block coding to text coding like Python and JavaScript.
• Mobile Apps – take Tynker Junior, Tynker, and Mod Creator on-the-go.

*All for a fantastic price! Our annual plan breaks down to just 33 cents per day .

Game Design Courses on Tynker

Intro to coding:.

Glitch Manor – (Ages 7+) Explore a haunted mansion, fight off zombies, solve mysteries, and more with 80 programming activities and 16 coding puzzles.

Turing’s Tower – (Ages 9+) Scour the globe and repair a flying tower to fight off a giant robotic dragon in this steampunk-styled platformer game with 56 programming activities and 16 coding puzzles.

Intermediate Game Design: Ages 8-13

Star Runner – Build 8 fun arcade games to advance your coding skills and learn 2D motion, pen drawing, and animation.

Goblin Quest – Use code to explore secret worlds, solve dungeon puzzles, and program armies to follow your commands.

Advanced Game Design: Ages 14+

Drone Menace – Program a multi-level arcade game with a scoring system, win-loss scenarios, and special effects.

Gravity Sling – Build an Angry Birds-style physics-based catapult game while learning to program gravity and collisions and even create a black hole!

Ninja Runner – Use advanced physics engine commands as you program a platformer game with your own hero and enemy A.I.

How Kids Learn to Code while Building Games

Building a game is an involved process, touching on a variety of left brain (logic) and right brain (creativity) functions while designing and programming scenes. All the planning that goes into game making increases kids’ ability to focus on tasks for long periods of time and see projects through to completion while developing their critical thinking and problem-solving skills.

• Interactive Scenes – place characters, make animations, and add effects. Kids can even draw their own characters and animate them with multiple frames.
• Sound – set the mood for any kind of scenario with music. Whether they want a dramatic intro sequence or an exciting duel, kids can choose from a variety of music clips and sound effects from our library. They can even compose their own music using our built-in MIDI interface and Tynker’s Synth Blocks.
• Character Motion – use loops to program the motion of characters and coordinate geometry to move sprites across the screen. For example, when programming a Pong or Brick Breaker game, kids have to use angles and speed to move the paddle and the ball.
• Game Play – program whether to detect user input from a mouse or the arrow keys and write code to handle these events. For example, press the spacebar to jump or click and the mouse to pop a balloon.
• Keeping Score – use variables and counters to keep track of the score, health, and number of lives, increasing and decreasing them based on key events during gameplay. Advanced users can even build leaderboards to rank players in the community.
• Detecting Win/Loss Conditions – use conditional logic to determine if a player won or lost a game.

How Can Video Game Coding Help Develop Programming Skills?

• Video game coding is engaging and motivating for developing programming skills.
• It keeps individuals invested in coding through fun and interactive games.
• Real-world challenges like character movement and collision detection reinforce programming concepts.
• Game development fosters problem-solving and logical thinking by breaking complex problems into smaller tasks.
• It combines technical and creative abilities through storytelling, art, and game mechanics.
• Debugging games teaches attention to detail and effective error-handling.
• It often involves teamwork, improving communication and collaboration skills.
• Coding games exposes programmers to various technologies and platforms.
• Completed game projects can be showcased in portfolios for job or academic opportunities.
• Overall, video game coding is a practical way to develop a broad spectrum of programming skills applicable to computer science and beyond.

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Check out these great block coding projects from our global community to see how kids are creating stages, animating characters, and producing sound with a variety of activities and interactive games.

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• The Level Editor lets you drag-and-drop game elements visually and create fun levels super fast.
• The Platformer Blocks help you code platformer actors to move left-and-right. Many of the props and characters in the Level Editor come with prebuilt code, which can be customized as needed.

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Programming assignments #3 and #4 - 3D Video Game

CS 248 - Introduction to Computer Graphics Autumn Quarter, 1999 Marc Levoy Handout #8

Required functionality

A few hints, video game submission requirements.

Assignment #3: Examining the Narrative in Games

Your task - play and review a game (25 points).

• Option A - Review a Story-based game: Play the Game First, select a computer/video game that has a strong storyline, such as a game from the Action-Adventure, RPG (Role-Playing Game), or Adventure genre (some Shooters have strong storylines too). This game may be a game that you have played before , but you still need to spend some time playing it to refresh your memory and better analyze it. I will also expect more detail in your assessment of the game and storyline if you've played the game before. Then, play the game. Please play the game for about 3 hours to ensure you gain a good understanding of the game. While playing the game, pay close attention to the various aspects of the storyline and characters in the game, including the synopsis, setting, backstory, primary characters, etc. Write a Game Review   (9 points) Write your own review of the game ( as you might see, for example, on a PC Gamer, Gamespot, or other similar game review venue ). Some possible points to consider/discuss: On a 10-point scale (10 being highest), what score would you give the game? Discuss both the merits and shortcomings of the games. How does the game work? What are the goals of the game? What types of gameplay challenges are used? What aspects of the game do you feel made the game exciting, interesting, or noteworthy? What aspects of the game were not successful in your opinion? Were there any parts/periods during your gameplay that were especially enjoyable or exciting? How about any parts/periods that were particularly boring or frustrating? Did you feel you achieved any degree of immersion while playing this game? History of the Game   (5 points) Try to find out as much information as possible about the history of the game.       Note: Some of these issues may have been discussed in your review, so you don't need to repeat that information here. For example, some types of questions to consider include: Pre-Release History: What year was the game released? What company (or companies) created the game? Had the company done earlier games in this genre? Who developed the game concept or was the lead designer? What other notable games has that company and/or designer developed? How long did it take to design/develop the game? For what platform(s) was the game released? etc. Post-Release History: Was the game well-received by the gaming market? What ratings did the critics give it? What ratings did gamers give it? Approximately how many copies were sold? Did the game have any expansions? When were they released? Was the game ever re-released in some other form (e.g. as part of a collection, in a gold edition, in a limited collector's edition, etc.)? Aspects of the Storyline and Characters   (11 points) Answer the following questions: (2 points)   Give a Synopsis of the progression of the storyline, as it unfolded in the time you were playing. (1 point)   See if you can find a Premise for the game. If so, please quote it here. (2 points)   Describe the Backstory and Setting for the game. (2 points)   Who were some of the main characters in the game, and how do they fit in with the typical Jungian character archetypes discussed in class? (2 points)   Were there any good examples of Balancing Conflict and/or Shifting Focus in the game during your play time? Please describe. (2 points)   Were that any parts/periods during your gameplay that were especially enjoyable or exciting? Did you feel you achieved any degree of immersion while playing this game?

Assignment: Video Game Product Proposal and Presentation

Randy Nichols, University of Washington, Tacoma

The exercise included is the final assignment for my course on the video games industry. It asks students to make use of the various readings and industry sources focused on questions of diversity and differences in media markets in order to create a proposal for a new video game related product. The chief goal is to have students think about the viability for a product which addresses areas the industry struggles with in terms of diversity, audience differences, accessibility issues, employment, etc. The project asks them to model their paper and presentation on a video game design document so that they’re also learning about that genre of writing. Similar assignments can be used in other media industry courses.

Download a PDF of the assignment here: Nichols Video Game Proposal

And a Word version here: Nichols video game proposal

Keywords:   game design , media industry , proposal , video game

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• Teaching Intimacy
• Teaching Materials

Video Game Music Project

Instructions:.

1. Create a basic idea for a retro video game. It could be:

• A puzzle game (like Tetris)
• A platforming game (like Super Mario)
• An arcade game (like PacMan or Space Invaders)
• Be creative! Think of an original idea.

2. Using Beepbox, create at least two music tracks for your game. The tracks can be:

• A character's theme
• Level music
• Main menu music
• Battle music, victory music, etc.

3. Design a character, level or image for each of your tracks.

• Use the pixel art websites linked lower on this page

4. Put the links to your song and your images onto a Word Online page. Make a title for your game and explain how each of the songs match your character, level, or image.

How to use Beepbox:

Beepbox is a website for creating retro-style "8-bit" video game music. The easiest way to understand how BeepBox works is to click on the links and see it for yourself. The instructions below will help you make your first tracks.

BeepBox Example Track 1

BeepBox Example Track 2

BeepBox Example Track 3

• Make your song longer by dragging the purple oval at the bottom

2. Select the instruments to edit their notes. Blue, yellow and red are instruments. Gray at the bottom is drums.

3. Create notes by clicking on the grid. Listen to your melody and try to make it match your character or level.

4. Change the numbers on the bottom so the same pattern doesn't keep repeating.

5. Slowly build your track for a good effect. Check out Example Track #2 to see a good example of a building track.

7. To save your BeepBox track, copy the URL at the top of the page (control + c). Paste it into your Word Online file (control + v) and press enter. You can always go back and edit your track again, but remember to copy and paste the URL each time you finish working on it.

• Create two music tracks for your video game idea (5 points each, 10 points total)
• Use Pixel Art Maker to design two character, levels, or images for each track (3 points each, 6 points total)
• Submit your Word Online file to Mr. Schaefer with a brief description of your game, links to BeepBox and Pixel Art Maker files, and explanation of how your tracks match your character/level/images.

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Lakers vs. Nuggets Game 2: The three biggest mistakes Darvin Ham made during stunning second-half collapse

It took a number of mistakes for the lakers to lose to the nuggets on tuesday.

The Los Angeles Lakers had a very real chance to not only steal a game against the Denver Nuggets on Monday, but swing the entire series. They led by 20 in the third quarter. They are 28-14 at home, and a win would have given them home-court advantage in the series. A year ago, the Lakers won two series as underdogs because they swiped one of the first two games on the road and never lost at home. Would you have bet against LeBron James in a best-of-five series with three home games?

Instead, well, you've seen the final score by now. The Lakers blew a 20-point lead . They lost to Jamal Murray at the buzzer. Now, they're down 2-0 in the series. They've lost 10 in a row to the Nuggets as a whole. The daunting prospect of still needing to win a game in Denver looms over the rest of the series. The Lakers will get only two more tries. In NBA history, 449 teams have gained a 2-0 series lead. Only 33 of them have come back to win the series.

And yet, in many ways, the game felt familiar. The recent history of the Lakers-Nuggets rivalry has revolved around three close quarters followed by a crunch time bloodbath. Entering Monday, the Lakers and Nuggets had played a total of 18 clutch minutes since the beginning of the 2023 Western Conference Finals. Denver won those minutes by a whopping 32 points. In Game 2, the Nuggets won the final five minutes and eight seconds by 10 points. Time and time again, once the Nuggets decide they are ready to take the Lakers seriously, they blow them out of the water. Head coach Darvin Ham never knows what levers to pull in response.

It takes dozens of things going wrong to blow a 20-point third-quarter lead. You need bad shooting variance. You need a bad whistle. You need sloppy, isolated missteps that are the natural outcome of tense, playoff basketball games. But more than anything, you need strategic mistakes, and the Lakers made several of them. Here are the three biggest ones they made down the stretch to allow the Nuggets the chance they needed to complete the comeback:

The rotation

Spencer Dinwiddie played 13 minutes in Game 1. The Lakers lost those minutes by 12 points. Though his size carries defensive upside, he's lost too much of a step to defend in a series like this properly. Teams frequently leave him open from deep and dare him to shoot. His 3-point numbers in Los Angeles have generally been good. For his career, he's a 33.3% shooter from deep. All of that is more or less how his second-half minutes played out on Monday. He entered the game with the Lakers up 10. Roughly four minutes later, he left with the Lakers up five. The Nuggets didn't guard him. They didn't notice him on defense either.

Ham isn't exactly in an easy position here. The Lakers signed Gabe Vincent for exactly this series. They watched him defend Murray well in the Finals. He's made his shots in high-pressure playoff moments before. But Vincent missed most of the season. As a result, he never quite earned Ham's trust in the way the front office likely hoped. So he played just 15 minutes in this one. He wasn't great, and didn't make a shot. But he's at least a threat from deep and his defense this postseason has largely been good. Disperse those Dinwiddie minutes to Vincent and Austin Reaves , who played only 33 in Game 2, and the outcome is potentially different.

And then there's the higher stakes matter of when to play LeBron. James took a seat with 3:44 remaining in the third quarter for his typical second half rest. But Ham allowed him only one minute of reprieve before re-inserting him into the game. This did two things that would eventually come back to bite the Lakers. The first is that it left James visibly exhausted for the most important minutes of the game: the beginning of the fourth quarter, when Nikola Jokic traditionally takes his rest. The Nuggets lost 25 games all season... but only 14 of those losses saw Denver outscored during Jokic's minutes. In the other 11, Denver won the Jokic minutes but lost the game because of how badly their bench lost its own minutes. The key to beating Denver is winning these minutes. The Lakers lost the no-Jokic minutes by a point because James was gassed and Anthony Davis was out.

To address James' exhaustion, Ham ultimately removed him again when Jokic returned. Again, his absence was for less than two minutes, and the Nuggets made up four more points while he was out. Yes, having James on the court at the end of the third quarter helped, but it deprived the Lakers of their best chance of knocking the Nuggets out for good. If a rested James takes the court early in the fourth-quarter, their lead might have grown enough to be safe.

Going away from their best play

Look at how easy this looks...

The TNT broadcast told us when the second half began that James and Davis stayed on the court during halftime to work on their pick-and-roll. When the third quarter started, the Lakers proceeded to run that play, their best play, every single time down the court. 

For five years, this has been their finishing move, their late-game checkmate to put a helpless opponent away. The Nuggets tried several coverages to slow it down. Jokic played a high-drop on the first video in that clip, so James snuck a pocket pass between the two defenders for the and-one. They blitzed the second, so James passed above them, giving Davis yet another easy layup over a too-small low-man (in this case, Murray). Jokic dropped lower on the third, and Murray shuffled over to help, so James nailed Reaves for an open 3.

Properly spaced, this is one of the best plays in basketball. There's no good answer to it unless you have two seven-footers that can switch (good luck with that). Go over the screen and James beats you to the rim. Go under, and now that he's evolved into a lethal shooter, he buries you from deep. Defend at the level of the screen and you're begging for a lob. Drop and you give James a head of steam to potentially draw a foul. Bring in a third defender and one of the best defenders in NBA history finds his shooter. It's an unguardable weapon that the Lakers are comfortable spamming when the need arises. Behind this play, the Lakers took their 15-point halftime lead up to 20.

And then? They... just... stopped... running it. Not fully, but they didn't run it anywhere close to often enough. James started using Rui Hachimura as his dance partner, often stashing Davis, the worst shooter in the starting lineup, in the strong side corner, where help could more easily arrive. D'Angelo Russell became a more frequent ball-handler as well, but his limited explosiveness gives him weaknesses that James doesn't have, especially against a Denver team that wins through discipline and intelligence rather than pure athletic skill.

Are there explanations for why the Lakers made this call? Sure. James and Davis were both exhausted by the end of the game. Maybe they lacked the stamina to abuse their best play as aggressively as they would have liked. The Nuggets also adjusted by switching that play more aggressively, so that when James got his screen, he ran into Aaron Gordon instead of Jokic. Ham had no response to this adjustment.

But in truth, it's a play the Lakers don't use often enough under any circumstances. For whatever reason, the Darvin Ham Lakers tend to get disorganized on offense and revert to isolation-ball far more often than the Frank Vogel versions did. The Lakers got sloppy down the stretch offensively when they'd found a play that consistently gave them easy points.

Not doubling Jokic

Before Game 2, Ham made an admission about defending Jokic that most coaches would secretly agree with. "It's like shit, I don't know what to do," he joked . To an extent, he's right. Jokic doesn't have a weakness. There's not a specific coverage that's going to stifle him. You're choosing between bad answers. It's just that Ham chose the worst answer down the stretch: he allowed Jokic to play one-on-one in the post. 

Jokic scored three times in the final five minutes. Davis attempted to guard him one-on-one each time. Jokic shot just below 53% when guarded by Davis in last year's Western Conference Finals. It's a matchup he's completely comfortable in. He even managed to get Davis airborne on the final shot he took of the night, picking up an and-one for his troubles.

Ham did have an adjustment here, but not a successful one. On Denver's final two possessions of the game, the Lakers put James on Murray and switched his pick-and-roll with Jokic. Once Murray realized this, he took advantage to set up a quick jumper before the switch set-in that tied the score at 99. And then, on the final possession of the game, the Nuggets took the switch to get Davis on Murray on the perimeter. They cleared the strong side so Murray would be able to work one-on-one. He created just enough space over the exhausted Davis to drill the game-winner.

Was there necessarily a good answer to any of this? No. But it's worth noting that Nuggets not named Porter or Jokic did not make a single 3-pointer in Game 2. They obviously could've heated up if given the chance, but given the circumstances, some help on Denver's two best players likely would have been warranted. It's just easier to stomach losing on role-player 3-pointers when those shots haven't been falling all night.

Every Lakers player and coach bears some responsibility for the loss, but strategic mistakes are the single fastest way to get knocked out of the postseason. Simply put, Michael Malone out-coached Ham on Monday, and that robbed the Lakers of their best chance to win this series.

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Yankees INF DJ LeMahieu Currently Scheduled For MLB Rehab Assignment With Somerset 

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Bridgewater, New Jersey – The New York Yankees are currently scheduling to have INF DJ LeMahieu begin an MLB Rehab Assignment with the Double-A Somerset Patriots on Tuesday, April 21 when the team travels to Reading to take on the Fightin Phils. The game is scheduled for 6:45 pm.

Bridgewater, New Jersey – The New York Yankees are currently scheduling to have INF DJ LeMahieu begin an MLB Rehab Assignment with the Double-A Somerset Patriots on Tuesday, April 21 when the team travels to Reading to take on the Fightin Phils. The game is scheduled for 6:45 pm.

The @yankees are currently scheduling an @MLB rehab assignment for INF DJ LeMahieu with the Somerset Patriots beginning in Reading on Tuesday, April 23. pic.twitter.com/YJ4tn2CUyM — Somerset Patriots (@SOMPatriots) April 22, 2024

LeMahieu was placed on the 10-day injured list on 3/25 with a right foot contusion. The three-time All-Star (NL 2015, 2017 and AL 2019) has an MLB career .292 average with 1,697 hits, 864 runs, 122 home runs, 625 RBI and 93 stolen bases in 1,561 games.

According to Elias Sports Bureau, LeMahieu is one of just three players in MLB history to win the batting title in both leagues, having won in the NL in 2016 with the Colorado Rockies (.348) and the AL in 2020 with the Yankees (.364).

He is a four-time Gold Glove Award winner, having won three times as a second baseman in the NL (2014, 2017, 2018) and as a utility player in the AL (2022). In addition, LeMahieu is a three-time Wilson Defensive Player of the Year (2013, 2017, 2018) and two-time AL Silver Slugger Award winner (2019, 2020)

The Visalia, California native was originally drafted by the Chicago Cubs in the 2 nd round of the 2009 MLB Draft and was signed by the Yankees as a free agent on 1/14/19.

He is the first player to rehab with Somerset this season and becomes the 35 th overall since the team became the Yankees Double-A affiliate in 2021.

About the Somerset Patriots The Somerset Patriots are the New York Yankees Double-A Affiliate and develop today’s top minor league talent into the pinstriped superstars of tomorrow for MLB’s winningest team. The Patriots 2024 season is presented by New Jersey Office Systems, LLC. Home games are played at TD Bank Ballpark in Bridgewater, NJ, where fans of all ages and levels of baseball fandom get to enjoy the unique experience that is minor league baseball. To learn more, visit: somersetpatriots.com .

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