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.