Jumping Challenge by Nicholas

Meet Nicholas! He’s another Accelerate student here at Game-U, and he works with Mike M., just like Thomas does. Nicholas and Mike are both interested in the new Crash Bandicoot re-release on PlayStation 4, so they spent a little time chatting about that before they really got into the day’s lesson. Remember Project Spark? That’s the game design program Philip and Andrew used to create Philip’s Simple Quest game.  Project Spark lets new game designers use cool tools like Paint, Biome, and Props to build customized gaming worlds. Today, Nicholas and Mike really dug into the Kode (that’s a Project Spark way to say computer code) features of the software to build a 3D platformer game. Check out the video they shared with us! The player (we like to call him Flynn Rider, after his lookalike in the movie Tangled) starts out in a water world that can be navigated by a series of platforms. His goal is to make his way to the special platforms that have flags. If Flynn falls in the water, he’s out, and he has to start again from the most recent checkpoint. Don’t know what a checkpoint is? Wondering how the computer knows when Flynn falls in the water? Let Nicholas explain! First, a checkpoint is a special spot in a game where you will be sent back if you fail. For Nicholas’ jumping challenge game, each flagged platform is a checkpoint, so Flynn doesn’t have to play the whole level over again every time he falls in the water or runs out of health fighting enemies. (Enemies? What do they have to do with anything? You’ll see!) Project Spark has Kode that can detect when Flynn is swimming, so Nicholas used the swimming Kode event to trigger a return to the nearest checkpoint. Nicholas and Mike even added some extra Kode that updates the definition of Flynn’s nearest checkpoint whenever he touches a new flag. That’s not all!  Flynn doesn’t just have to jump from platform to platform to win the game – he’s got to fight some enemies too. For when Flynn runs out of health (watch his health bar), Nicholas coded instructions to send him back to the nearest checkpoint, so he can recover and try again. Your game looks awesome, Nicholas! We’re looking forward to trying it out with you.