What’s Happening 28th Sept 2012

We’re meeting at the Kinsale Community School at 7.00PM. Here’s what each of the different groups will be doing:
1. Beginner’s Scratch:  You will be programming a Squash Game from a tutorial developed by Steve O’Neil (http://www.oneil.com.au/pc/scratch.html). You can download the tutorial from his web site or here: Scratch-Lesson-1.
2. Experienced Scratch: You too will be working through one of Steve’s tutorials, this time a Drawing Programme. Again, you can download the tutorial from his site or from here: Scratch-Lesson-4
3. GameMaker: Most of you are just getting started with GameMaker so we suggest that you run through some tutorials. You can find some good ones on this site: http://sandbox.yoyogames.com/make/tutorials. We suggest that you start with the “Your First Game” tutorial with a game called “Catch the Clown”. The download from this page is a ZIP file that contains a PDF and some resource files used to create the game. This is the PDF: GM Tutorial – First Game, but you will need to download the ZIP file to get all the resources needed to build the game.
It seems that you all want to be building games 🙂 Part of the skill is knowing the system you’re using to build the game (Scratch, Alice or Gamemaker). The other skill is knowing how to design your game in the first place. Following the tutorials is good to learn the nuts and bolts, but you should now be thinking about designing your own game!
To find out about how to design and build a good game take a look at this tutorial: GM Tutorial – Designing Games. This is from the http://sandbox.yoyogames.com/make/tutorials site about GameMaker, but it applies to all types of Game development software.
If you can, please download and print out the tutorials that you want to be following on the night!
Thanks, Nick Grattan.