Mouse + Cheese

The Semester is wrapping up and I have got an accomplishment id like to share! This semester I got to volunteer with students in the Animation & Game Art Club here at Kalamazoo Valley Community College in the Center For New Media where I got to share some of my knowledge in Programming, to help enable students make their first game from start to finish! If you are curious, you can check out our final product here  

I ended up stumbling into this after competing in my first Game Jam with a friend, maybe 6 months ago where we made my first game Allegory Cave. Allegory Cave is a simple card game dungeon crawler where your objective is to defeat monsters and make it out of the cave, using your deck of magical cards. As someone who is not an artist but has an aptitude for programming, I was thankful for the fact that I had my artistic friend to help aid in the art side of game development.

Ultimately, after the Game Jam was over I kept thinking about how accessible this experience was, to be able to come into the game jam, with one or two specific skills, and to be able to pair up with other people from across the world and make something tangible! I ended up talking it over with a peer here seeing if they would be somewhat interested in hosting an event like that and we found a few students dedicated to the experience. We started the semester out, discussing what a Game Jam was, and then brainstorming an idea, and then finally putting it all together into what we have today.

While the game itself is rough around the edges, I would say that it is functionally a game, and through building this game, I was able to help teach the students fundamental programming concepts as well things like how to manage feature creep, developing intuitive problem-solving skills, fostering out-of-the-box thinking during development. I feel confident that each of them should now be able to share their experiences with making a game but also improve upon the game on their own time, making various levels, and enhancements to the game fixing the bugs we didn’t have time to get to.

The final thing I’d like to note to you, is that this is the final product of roughly 12 hours, or one hour a week on Friday! In 12 hours, we were able to make this, and in another 12, you may have a fully flushed out game! Id like to highlight, that while at the beginning making a game can seem kind of intimidating; there’s so many things to do, and when participating in a game jam there so little time to do it! With the right tools, a little bit of time, and a few friends to help along the way, everything is possible.