Over last summer we started using Microsoft XNA but the typing rate of your average middle school student combined with the difficulties of C# led to the majority of the students becoming frustrated. While they were able to comprehend supprising amounts of information and create modifications to my code that I had not thought of (their creativity is inspiring) I felt that their experience to game creation could be better served by a higher level game creation solution.
My solution was to go back to my roots. While when I was first starting out I used KNP, The Game Factory, and Multimedia Fusion (All from Clickteam), I opted for this group to use Game Maker by YoYo games. I had never used GameMaker before but I found the beginner interface was a really great interface for the students and they seemed to comprehend everything much easier. I also liked the fact that I could still discuss important concepts such as the Cartesian coordinate system, variables, and even some basic OOP, all without some of the more tedious typing details.
Over the course of an hour and a half we created a simple game involving a basketball moving using both the arrow keys and the mouse that collected purple balls to gain score and once all the purple balls were gone the next level was reached. It was somewhat refreshing to create the sort of games that are randomly designed and created in a short time period for entertainment! It took the pressure out of the game development and focused on the aspect of bringing an idea to life (however simple).
I guess the point of this entry into my journal is that sometimes it can be a refreshing change of pace to use authorware even if you know low level programming techniques... sometimes it can also be refreshing to just create a simple little game for no real reason... Sure the game that was created last Saturday won't win game of the year, but it was fun and I think that is something that is easy to lose sight of in the intense battleground that modern computer game development has become.
Thank you for reading.
