Remember that emergency late notice news piece last week regarding the BAFTA Families event? Well Media Molecule have posted a report of the event to their blog.
Anton opened the proceedings with a brief bit about what programming is, and a child-friendly history of the company (e.g. “Here is a picture of Kareem, he is Egyptian” and “This is Alex and Dave, they like pink”). He included a code sample from the game to illustrate his first point (”This page of code makes the character jump”), so if you are keen to learn what goes on under the hood consider attending about 50,000 similar presentations, and maybe you’ll be able to view the entire codebase!
I then continued with a bit about the Create aspect of the game, and admitted that I hadn’t been allowed to show the photo of me peeing my name in the snow. I talked about the world the game is set in, and the kinds of things you can make - and how cool it is to be able to share what you created in your living room with 1000s of people around the world.
Danny finished off with a brief talk about level design, and introduced the task they were to perform - design their own game! The children had 45 minutes for this, and namely they needed to come up with a title for the game, a lead character and perhaps a nemesis, and a description of what you would do. At the end they would have 1 minute to pitch their concept to the rest of us. So off they went and got busy with paper, paint, felt, glue and glitter to make something amazing!
Sounds like it was a really entertaining morning for the kids who attended, and a level featuring the kids’ faces, handily snapped by a PS3 Eye camera, will possibly be published some time sooner or later - cute!
Why not check out the full report from molecule Jonny, and also the flickr photos from the event, over on the mm page.
