Open Source Ecosystems

###It is winter and you are trying to free summer.

A game by Jack and John Polacek

A few years ago, I made a game called Match the Letter help him with ABCs, and to learn a thing or two myself about app development. It’s still available on the Google Play Store (FREE and no annoying ads).

A couple years later, he asked me to teach him to make a game. I told him he’d need to know how to code. And to do that, he needed to learn to read.

Fast forward to 1st grade, and he reads pretty well. The day before Thanksgiving, I was working at home (because my job is cool like that) and Jack brought it up again.

I started asking him questions and taking notes from what he said. He likes the Blocky Roads game (available on iOS and Android) so from what I can tell, that is his inspiration.

We have made some progress and I want to share it out with my fellow devs who might want to do the same thing with their kids. Play it here and check out the project on Github. Shoot, all you have to do is just replace the png graphics with your kid’s own drawings and you will be all set. The look on my son’s face when he could play the game he thought of, using his own hand drawn graphics, was UNBELIEVABLE! It is so much fun!

Jack is providing all the drawings and direction on the game design. I just do what he tells me, while trying to teach him what it takes to implement his vision along the way.

Big thanks to Photon Storm, the folks behind the Phaser HTML5 Mobile and Desktop game framework without whom this would not be possible. And super big thanks to Markus T who published a fantastic tutorial that gave me a huge jumpstart and is responsible for most of the code that is behind the game thus far.

I will keep working on it as long as he stays interested. No promises on how far we will get, but so far it is so fun to work with him on it! (And we even get his 2-year-old brother in on the action play-testing on his own tablet)

Development Log

###11-26-14

My notes from Jack’s description of what he wanted his game to be (verbatim)

Car

You can decorate it
Drive around farmyard
Press a button to make it go
Only go straight.
The car is named Syndro

Obstacles

Hills
Hot lava
Ramps
Parachutes if the car explodes
Other cars that are damaged

Buildings

You can click on a building to park on it
Find stuff thats moving then unlock them in your farmyard

Scenery

people walking by

When we finished the intro screen, Jack asked me “Are we finished??”

I told him we were done with the first step. He asked how many steps there were. I said about a thousand. He was unfazed by this and excited to start the next step. Here are the steps we have so far:

Step 1 - Intro Screen (Jack picked the font)
Step 2 - Draw the car
Step 3 - Animate the car
Step 4 - Pick a Physics Engine - Phaser
Step 5 - Create game page with hello world example
Step 6 - Find car game example to use (found this great tutorial!

Worked on animating the car and separating it into pieces in Photoshop.

###11-27-14

Step 7 - Bring Jack’s car drawing into the game
Step 8 - Jack draw preview and control buttons
Step 9 - Add preview button to intro screen

###11-28-14

Step 10 - Add button controls for touch devices
Step 11 - Publish open source for testing and sharing
Step 12 - Jack and Grant (little bro) test on mobile devices
Step 13 - Jack draw more game elements
Step 14 - Draw home screen icon

###11-29-14

Step 15 - Open source on Github
Step 16 - Add Jack’s ramp graphic
Step 17 - Add barnyard background

###2-21-15

As boys do, Jack lost interest in the game for awhile. He was very occupied with Minecraft, Chess, Minecraft, playing in the snow, Minecraft, watching superhero movies, Minecraft, playing with his brother, Minecraft and Minecraft. This morning though, he suddenly remembered and it became supremely important to add hot lava to the game.

Step 18 - Add lava
Step 19 - Add explosion

###2-21-17 Jack and his little brother Grant were talking about types of jobs. They talked about being a programmer like me and we remembered our old game we made together. We started playing it a little and Jack wanted to add a restart button, so we did.

Step 20 - Add restart button

free-summer

Development Log