Today’s generation of children seem to love nothing more than “screen time”, whether that be YouTube, or playing games on a phone, tablet or laptop/chromebook. My two kids are no different and so I thought how can I incorporate some “screen time” with something a bit more productive that we can all do together.

I started to research creating my own mobile game. Having been in the IT industry for over 20 years, I knew about programming, but wanted something easier to use than writing lines of code, so I could get the kids involved and so we could visualise it and create it much quicker. Searching Google for mobile game making tools generated a lot more options than I had imagined there would be, so I started to narrow down the choices to ones that required little or no coding and had examples of simple 2D games created with them. I tried out a few like Godot and GDevelop, before finally settling on Construct 3.

I had a wee dabble with the tool, getting familiar with the concepts and the interface and soon decided it would be easier to learn as we went along. I decided we should make something fairly simple for our first ever game, so a 2D platform endless runner seemed realistic and achievable. My son, aged 12 volunteered to create original characters for the game and got to work drawing sprites in a free pixel editor. My daughter, aged 8 came up with the idea for our first and main game character, a hot dog! 😂 That’s where having the minds of children made me smile and think, “err ok, that’s cool and unique”, as I would have never thought of that. We named him “Mr Mustard” and my son quickly created a hot dog with legs, arms, a face, covered in mustard and different versions for him jumping and running. I pieced them together in the game engine to turn them into sprite animations and just like that, we had our main game character done! Not only that, but the kids were actually agreeing on something and working well together, which made a change.

Whilst my son continued to knock out a few more characters, my daughter and I brainstormed screen designs, how should it look, what buttons should we have, what style, what colours, what music and so on. As the ideas kept flowing, I was beavering away building the screens and implementing the logic. We worked on it an hour or two at a time over the next few days until we had the game screen done and our animated character playable in a simple way. I spent the next week or so, a wee hour here and there polishing the game up, adding a home page and a scoreboard and learning about publishing mobile games. An Android game seemed like the most feasible target platform and also the cheapest, with a one-off cost of $25 to register as a developer on the Google Playstore, compared to Apple’s recurring annual $99 charge. Plus, we all had Android devices in our house, so it was a no-brainer really.

As the game started to take shape, the kids and I thought up new features, such as unlocking other characters and increasing the difficulty and agreed what was going to make the first release of the game, and what could wait until a future version. We did lots of exporting apk packages of the game to my phone and the kids tablets and testing it worked as expected and ironing out a few bugs until we were happy with what we had achieved.

I then registered with the Playstore as a developer and started getting to grips with all the details you have to supply in order to publish your game. We decided we wanted the game to be suitable for children as well as grown ups, so I set about tweaking the Admob settings to restrict to child friendly adverts, not including any in-app purchases, ensuring no unnecessary device permissions were requested and going through the process of getting “Pegi 3” and “family friendly” ratings approved by Google.

Later the next day, it was approved and ready to go! I published it for release and waited to see what happened next, as having never done this before, it was actually quite exciting. It took a couple of days until I got an email saying it was now live in the Playstore and we quickly jumped on our devices to check and download it, how cool, our own game out in the big wide mobile world. The kids have loved telling their friends about it and how they were involved and already have plenty of ideas for future updates we can work on. I doubt it will become the next viral game like Flappy Bird, (we can dream), but that’s ok, it was a great learning experience, it still is, and it got us all working together, being creative and having fun.

Jump Dash is available to download for free here: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.debranz.jumpdash

Website: https://sites.google.com/view/jumpdash/home

Youtube channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCixBeqvwUxKlYzCFBicuJKg