I haven’t blogged about this group because I blogged about the first group in detail, but these guy are certainly worth mentioning as they are a group of 12 7-year-old game designers and they have been spot on with their work.

When making games with students I let them use a bit of custom graphics software that I have coded (in Processing) it doesn’t have a name, but it does a lot. Firstly, I give each student a number, they put that in and it automatically saves all files with that number in the title i.e. good1.PNG for the good guy so I know it belongs to student number 1. It is extremely useful when dealing with so many graphics from so many games. Secondly it saves everything for them,  generates a background colour and crops the images for compositing later when put into the game engine. Thirdly it limits the graphic size 64×64 pixels maximum keeping the game retro in style and finally it only allows the use of 16 colours again for making it all very retro. Very simply you click a colour and click where you want it to go, one pixel at a time, sound laborious but it make the students really think about each one of their pixels when transferring their paper sketches into a computer.

But there is one thing it doesn’t do.

A lot of the games in this group for some reason or another feature doughnuts, subconsciously it entered the minds of around five of the twelve game designers and now we have them in the games. Repeatedly throughout the session I was asked “How do you draw a circle?” which struck me as odd. Odd because I grew up in pixels, I have been sketching out characters on graph paper since the 80′s (I spent most of my school days drawing sprites btw). So I had to stop the lesson and explain how to draw circle one pixel at a time. It turns out that the students are very fluent in Microsoft Paint which is great and some of them have even ventured in to Adobe Photoshop which is fantastic, the more varied software the better. The one thing these wonderful pieces of software feature is pre-made shapes that you can re-size. It was a wonderful “digital” moment, but is this a skill that has been lost? Drawing the doughnuts was tricky because they were circles with smaller circles in them, but we got through it. The question is are “hand-made” graphics becoming a lost skill?

I am certainly not about to add circles and squares to the software, because I really want them to think about how each pixel effects the overall sprite design, but this was an unintended bonus in terms of preserving a “old school” way of doing things.

Today the students took on “stop-motion” animation, after watching a few clips the students made their characters out of egg boxes and then animated them.
It was a good session they are a very lively bunch of kids, well behaved and were very pleased in seeing their little characters come to life.

Next week is all about “traditional cel-frame” animation and we will also be making some Zoetropes too!

A new year, a new group of students and an entirely new course, animation.

Here is one of the videos made at the end of the first Springfield Junior Animation workshops with Year 3′s (7 to 8 year olds). The robot “D-BOT” was pre-made before the workshop and has paper fasteners as hinges in its joints.

“Image taken from workshop prep”. During the first session the students went through a brief history of animation and looked at two distinct styles “silhouette” and “cut-out” and had a go at trying both styles using premade assets. They also made a Thaumatrope all of their own.

It was a great session and very different for me teaching that age range, next week we will be looking at stop-frame animation and having a go at it ourselves.

I always like to have a plan, in fact most of my 2012 is already planned out and I have some cool things coming up.

A lot of you may have noticed I have moved away from being “Pixelh8″, I still am “Pixelh8″ I am just more interested in promoting, facilitating and helping others be creative, I have always done this, it is just my main focus now. Whether it be making or performing music, designing or programming games or creating stop frame animation. 2012 is going to be about helping others create. There are two reasons for this;

1) I have had five years of fun, making and promoting myself as Pixelh8 it would be nice to now help others.

2) I am starting my PhD in “Educational Music Technology” all my research will be focused on helping to get others involved in music performance and creation.

There are already some great events I am booked for in 2012, Games Britania a game making festival in Rotherham which is building year on year, HESFES home educating festival where i’ll be designing games in a field, BACON a two day technology conference, British Museum workshops, St. Albans game design week, Young Rewired State 2012 and working with IP1 and The Mix to deliver so unique music making workshops. Don’t panic if I have missed anything. The full list albeit amazing is quite long indeed.

This doesn’t include the two patents, several conferences, maybe another published paper, being in a book about music, making all of my existing iPhone Apps HD for the iPad, “OCARBOT 2″ and “Cross-side” for iPhone, helping my ex-degree students publish some XBOX 360 games, jumping out an airplane and sending something else into space. 2012 will be busy.

Of course this is just the “plan” things will change. “OCARBOT EDU” has been slightly delayed to fix a few things here and there; try and trim the 134MB distribution size, allow myself a chance to recharge my batteries and to play on some new games and software over christmas.

Hopefully I’ll bump in to you in 2012 either in real life or on twitter, @pixelh8. Either way I hope 2011 was good for you and that 2012 will be even better. If you need me for anything just drop me a line.

Today was the last of this groups game design sessions, with the group of  “future game designers”.

I have to say this first before I move on to the rest of the blog, they were an excellent group and it was a real privilege to work with them over a extended period of time.

Today was just inputting the rest of the level designs in to the game engine and finishing the game boxes (see picture), although they didn’t get to play on the game, they did get to see what it looks like on a huge screen. The game will be presented to them on CD tomorrow morning in assembly and I hope they feel proud of what they have acheived when they collect them.

We also had a long discussion about the project as a whole; what they liked, what they didn’t, what could be improved over time. I explained to them, that the only difference between what they did in these sessions and what professional game makers do, is have more time. They had 10 hours in total to create a concept, design it and create it as well as consider the marketing behind it.  I then went on to explain that 10 hours is something that a professional game maker may spend on creating a tiny element in a game like a layout of an options screen. The other factor I got them to consider was they were working alone on this project (except for one pair), in some major games there are hundreds of  people involved, designers programmers, designers, musicians, marketing. They were year 6 students and they made a whole game in 10 hours.

I hope more than anything, they have gained confidence from these sessions, this is another thing they “can do”, this “is” an option for them in their future. There are so many great game companies in the UK I know some of these students are destined to be their future designers.

Recently I was asked to run a workshop in a high school for year 11 students, and when they explained it would be for my old High School Chantry, I jumped at the chance.

It was quite apparent upon my arrival at the school that things had moved on a bit since I attended there circa 1993, long gone were the 286′s and RM machines. All the staff had pretty much been replaced too.

Today I had a huge class of 28 students much larger than my normal game workshop, but that is fine as we had lots to do and I divided them in to eight groups. I had four hours with them today, so the work had to be fast and furious, luckily the students were “fired up” as the ICT Carol Skeates put it, and they were able to get on with it and quick too.

I took them through the history of platform games and about some of the work I had done, then on to their designs on paper, then on computer, they even designed a DVD case for their game too!

All the graphics and level designs are now done (see Level Editor in picture), so it is just up to me to compile and test it and deliver it to them on Friday.

They were a great bunch of students who produced a high standard of work and I suspect quite a few might be interested in getting in to games development and taking what they have learned further. It was also nice to do the workshop at Chantry High School, I know I would have loved to do stuff like this when I was a student there, it just didn’t really exist then. Thanks to Carol Skeates and Mr Andrew Fell for letting me come by and run the workshop.

Another good session with the students from Springfield Junior School today. It was the day they got to see their game come to life inside the games engine and input the level design. One by one they took turns inputting the objects into the game map while the others designed their DVD case for their games (see picture, “Spark World”) just one of twelve platform games made during these sessions.

It was probably a combination of seeing their game characters move around and it drawing ever closer to christmas that had them all excited, but still they all maintained their ability to focus and pull off some amazing work.

One student remarked that these sessions were unlike normal ICT sessions and were “cooler and more fun” and as a class we reflected on this noting that all the skills we were using in these sessions were actually “borrowed” from other lessons; Physics to control the character and the gravity, English to write the story and keep a diary, Art to design the characters, Physical Education even helped in establishing rules of play. It goes on, and it turns out the things they learned in the other ICT lessons were just as important as it allowed them to know how save things in the correct format and to be confident in using a computer. I am very pleased how much they are learning and how much they are able to vocalise what they have learned and even disect it like we did today.

The other discussion that followed was another one about skills with some students suggesting they are better at ideas or art or using computers, so we discussed if they would like to do the sessions again in the future but all as one group working on the same game. Running the sessions like a big game studio with each student in a specific role. Again it was interesting to see them jump at the chance of delegating and discussing what roles they could have in the new game company as well as suggesting ideas like doing research in the playground to help decide what kind of games should be made.

I always end the session with them writing in their “Game Design Diary” and reiterating what we’ve done and what we are going to do next week.

Next week we are simply going to play on the game and review the whole process. I am hopefully gonna do some audio recordings next week  of their experiences and edit it together with footage of their games and pictures of their work, so they also have a video to remind them of just how much they have achieved over these five sessions.

Session 3 of the Game project was all about the graphics, taking them from the sketches and drawing them into the graphics software I have developed for retro style games. Drawing out the “Good Guy”, “Bad Guy”,” Item” and “Platform” as well as the background  in a separate editor all ready to be put in and tested in the game engine next week.

The students began to realise the value of making them draw several sketches of their characters and their respective worlds when they began “reducing them” in to 64X64 pixel sprites. It is really good doing a project over several weeks with a group of students, seeing how the develop their ideas over time instead of within a short one day session.

As always the students were friendly, polite and most important inquisitive, I think they are beginning to look at the games they play and think, “I can do that”.

Today was the second session at Springfield Junior School, and the main focus of the day was character design. Looking at some of the more popular platform game characters and trying to work out why so many characters wear white gloves? Do some games use colours like traffic lights,  green platforms are safe, yellow rings or coins are important and red bad guys are dangerous? Is it possible to tell the story of the game from analysing the box art? Although not all of the teaching materials for OCARBOT EDU are ready I used some of the assets and stories from the development to help teach about game making.

The second half of the session was the students turn, they carried on revising their designs for their games and then presented them in a 60 second pitch to the group. All the ideas and presentations were great and everyone is on target for the next session in which we will start loading the graphics in to a specially created piece of software for retro style games.

I re-visited Suffolk New College today, this time to deliver two lectures on Star Wars sound effects and Film music, it was good to have both music and media students in attendance as it was relevant to both groups.

I took them through the first 10 minutes of the “Star Wars: Clone Wars” cartoon analysing the sound design and through the first 10 minutes of “Star Wars: A New Hope” analysing (and in some cases note for note) the music of John Williams.

The lectures have been a success at University Campus Suffolk and Anglia Ruskin and they certainly seemed to enjoy it and and take on some of the terminology used in film music and sound. Although this was to be a brief introduction, I hope some of them go on to extend their studies in this area.