I am not a gamer. I admit it freely, and without reservation. But during the tenure of this online course I’ve been taking on creating a game I’ve come up against so many roadblocks that I’ve somehow found a way through that I feel a little less amateurish in my attempts than I did before.
10 weeks ago I started this journey with high hopes, and along the way I realized just how much of a digital immigrant I really am. So tonight I relied on a native to help me navigate the issues I had left before I could arrive at a conclusion to the whole enterprise. As you can guess, Lexi was more than pleased to assist me in my quest.
Lexi: Daddy, what’s that person over there for?
Me: That’s a ghost.
Lexi: But how can a ghost be in the game?
Me: I put the ghost in the game because I was trying to be original.
Lexi: So you can talk to a ghost? That’s cool.
Me: Yeah, do you know how long it took me to figure out how to make those interactions work?
Lexi: I know, right? It’s like what I’m doing on Blocks World.
Me: Exactly. It’s the same kind of programming. Except for me it takes a lot more research.
Lexi: What do you mean by research?
Me: Well, to do every little thing in this game I pretty much had to watch at least an hour’s worth of video and follow the steps in order. Then work out the bugs.
Lexi: What’s a bug?
Me: When something goes wrong and I can’t figure it out.
Lexi: Oh yeah, that’s what I do in Blocks World too. Sometimes things appear out of nowhere, and I have to fix them.
Me: So I made a ghost, but I had to figure out how to make a conversation with her, and I had to make it so she could ask questions.
Lexi: That’s cool. So she’s not like the ghost guards who you can walk through?
Me: No. You can’t talk to her if you can walk through her.
Lexi: That makes sense. Daddy, I can’t wait until I can play this game!
Me: Well, I still have to program in the questions so players can’t cheat and keep answering them, but then I’ll be done.
Lexi: How can people cheat on the questions?
Me: See how they can go up to this stone, tap on it, and the question comes up with the multiple choices after? Well, they can keep answering until they get it right. I need to figure out how to stop that from happening.
Lexi: You’re smart, daddy. You’ll figure it out.
Me: Thanks for the confidence, baby. I bet if I let you build a game with this program you’d come up with so much more I haven’t even tapped into yet.
Lexi: You’re going to let me build a game like you did?
Me: Lex, you’re going to build better games than me someday. Believe me.
Lexi: I can’t wait.
Me: Neither can I.
Sam
Sam's Online Journal 