Visual Arts & Technologies

Year 8 Game Development and Animations

Article by Michael Robertson, Teacher of Technologies

Throughout the first semester, the Year 8 Game Development and Animations class have been building their understanding of JavaScript through creating shapes and displaying images as sprites using code. From there, they’ve progressed into bringing these visuals to life by applying counter patterns within loops to manipulate position and create movement. 

Students have developed their programming skills from the ground up, learning how functions and parameters operate to construct and position shapes using coordinates. This foundation led into their first assessment task, where they designed and coded a face based on a set of requirements. These included defining the head shape, representing a specific emotion, and incorporating a randomly assigned accessory that needed to be thoughtfully integrated into the design. This process involved sketching mock-ups and organising ideas through a data dictionary before translating them into code. 

Following this, students explored how to create, import, and modify images as sprites. They then extended this knowledge into animation, enabling sprites to move, rotate, scale up, and shrink through code. The use of Selection and Iteration patterns (using If/Else and Loops) have then given more variety and complexity to their movement. 

Building on this, the class has now begun introducing interactivity by using button presses and mouse clicks to control these animations. This shift from simple movement into user interaction marks the beginning of designing their own interactive experiences; i.e their first games! 

By the end of the term, all students will have taken a game from initial idea through the problem-solving methodology to ideate, analyse, design, develop their games. Finally comes evaluation by, of course, playing and testing each other’s solutions.