I programmed my own video game. Its called ‘otter vs. urchins’. It’s a space invaders style game, where sea urchins rain down on a kelp forest. The player is an otter and has to protect the kelp forest by munching and crushing the urchins.
When I say ‘programmed my own game’, I actually mean ‘wrote instructions for the Copilot AI to program the game’.
The game is written in Python, with the pygame package. Not a programming language I know well.
Doesn’t matter, because copilot knows Python and can follow my instructions. I could leverage the AI to help me build the game and it helped me learn how to write my own python code.
It was super fun to develop and I got my kids involved, who love having their own homemade game. They drew the game ‘art’ (texta drawings that I digitised) and recorded the sounds (me munching on lettuce to make a crunching urchin sound).
Pygame makes it easy to integrate the custom media into your game. And the AI meant we could go very quickly from a gaming idea to a working game.
My bigger agenda is to use video games as learning tools. They allow students to fail often and fail safely. Failing safely is one of the fastest ways to learn.
So I’ve wanted to develop my own games to teach ocean science for a while. But I’ve been put-off by the computer programming involved. I’ve tried using Rshiny, because I know that language well. But its not well set-up for game simulation.
Looking forwards to making more games that are fun and next time hopefully with some educational value.
Designed by Chris Brown. Source on Github