Campaign Finance Reform! In game form!
For Randi’s birthday on Sunday, I thought it would be fun to make a video game. (That might sound crazy, but she thought it would be fun to run a half-marathon: at least my craziness can be done sitting down.) To do this I chose Construct 2, a lovely bit of software from London-based start-up Scirra. It took a couple of weeks to get the whole thing done, but the learning curve is gentle and the basics quickly understood. If you’ve ever had the itch to make a game yourself, this is an easy yet flexible way of doing so.
I still get tingles from the power of the tools available to us today. It’s something I see with the kids I mentor with, too – with a little effort, it’s remarkably easy to quickly pull together a project which would have required feats of organisation and specialist equipment in the past. I can just about remember doing a primary school assignment on Greece, say, with an out-of-date edition of Encyclopaedia Britannica, a Compton’s CD-ROM and possibly a colour printer if it wasn’t out of ink.
This makes me sound so old, I know.
Collect cash, beat turtles, avoid cars, kill zombies and more
Tomorrow night we embark on a long Memorial Day weekend to the West Coast, knocking out two more states from my travel list. I can’t promise to get to 50, but I can try 😀
Constance Delannoy, Catherine Tarsney, Katie Sharing, Shelby King, Jason Zhou, Tayler Sommers, Randi Lawrence liked this post.
Just to be clear, running the half marathon and completing your game took about the same amount of time. So I’d say they are equally (and wonderfully) crazy. 😀