Todays session was about “cel-frame” animation, again we looked at some examples of contemporary cartoons they know and love and then took to making our own animation loops based on a stick man running.

As the group is quite young i.e. 7-year-olds I had to make up 12 Zoetropes in preparation for the lesson, this was no easy or quick feat by any stretch of the imagination. It was however quite simply worth it, for the looks on their faces when they got to see their characters come to life. They sketched out their charcaters, coloured them in,  stuck them together to make the loops and they were great.

I even learned something today, I learned how to animate a cape flapping behind a running super-hero.

Next week we will be planning out our animation, we are planning to re-make “Little Red Riding Hood” with each group making a scene each, they will be divided into groups and given roles.  We will storyboard it, build sets, animate, edit, narrate and score it all in 4 weeks (8 hours).

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.

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.

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.

After giving a talk at BT recently about interesting and creative uses of technology, I was asked by Springfield Junior School, Ipswich to visit and help do some fun and creative projects with them. Today was our first session and it was fantastic.

I started by a simple introduction to the children about the types of projects I have done in the past. I then took them through a brief history of “platform games” showing them the key events in the evolution of the genre.  Following that was a brainstorming session with the children drawing, writing and discussing the games that they would like to make.   Finally the session ended with them filling in their “Game Design Diary” to help keep track of what they have done and hope to achieve over the course of the project.

I had a group of 12 year 6 students, I think it was equal number of boys and girls which was good to see.  They were all excellent, polite and attentitive, I really hope they enjoyed and learned from the session.

Next week we are going to look at character design and then have them present their ideas in the style of a 60 second pitch to game producer.

I am really pleased with todays outcome the kids got on with the work and were vocalising and visualising their ideas well.  A big thanks to Mr. Rogers Mr. Pearsons for their help and support.