Our newest kid’s coding class began 8 weeks ago and they seemed to be our strongest batch of students yet. So we offered the opportunity to stay for another 2 hour session, unrelated to web development. We introduced them to the world of game development.

As a teaser to get the students warmed up into this region, we had them recreated probably the biggest game of the early 2010s, Flappy Bird. As a someone who was big on mobile gaming during this time period, I was devastated when I found out it was removed from the App Store before I got the chance to download it on my mother’s phone. So to get the opportunity to learn how to remake it and also teach it to some students it felt like the right opportunity to take.

We lightly went over it in our 2 hour session and I told the students, “Watch through the tutorial and do as much as you can”. I only expected a half-hearted attempt as a majority of these kids are still in primary school, so when I saw that one student had not only finished the tutorial but also went above and beyond to add his own features.

Hard Work And Talent Breeds Success

10 year old Hudhayfah was eager to show me what he had completed and his excitement was really easy to see as his couldn’t wipe the smile off of his face. He showed me what he made and it felt truly surreal to see what he had made in only 7 days. He completed the tutorial and even added his own features such as a moving background to make the game more immersive and more intriguing. I kept reiterating to the students 3 key features that their games must content for it to be engaging and fun. I wanted to instil this information into the students so they would never forget wherever they went into their game development journeys.

Every game must have a factor of replay ability, an intense atmosphere/danger and a rewarding feeling at the end. He had added a feature that would allow the player to continually keep playing after the player dies. The feeling of avoiding the pipes had elements of the danger that the player has to experience and also there was a scorekeeping feature that had parts of the rewarding feeling and also the feature of constantly replaying as the player wants to beat the previous high score and go again.

What’s next for Hudhayfah?

The aim is to get him involved in 3D game as that is the real money maker for someone as young as he is. Without the teacher’s input, he seems to be doing that on his own so for someone like him, he’s got a lot of potential.

Written by Saabir Hussein.