Game in development club involves designing a game for student play

Game Development Club is making a free video game on N112’s computers at lunch on Tuesdays and Thursdays.

The game will be a one-level sci-fi platformer set in a snow desert on an alien planet, likely starring an astronaut trying to return to their home world.

Kai Knecht, club cofounder and ninth-grade student, said that the gameplay will be “mostly combat, maybe a few puzzles” and that the game will likely be for download.

Game Dev Club splits the work between four people, with programming and art being the major categories of work.

“We start with preferences, whatever you want to do,” Knecht said. “Then we go by importance, what needs to get done, and we go from there.”

The club uses software such as Unity, Photoshop and Adobe to develop the game.

“We also use ChatGPT a lot,” Knecht said. “We don’t directly copy from it, we just get the general ideas from ChatGPT for code and things that would be super hard to find on our own.”

Sophomore Neve Takahashi deals with most of the game’s art development, which involves large amounts of hand-drawing. The game will use a mix of hand and computer animation.

Takahashi said that she has always been interested in drawing, but only got involved with game development recently.

Game Dev Club is a new presence at Ballard High School; Knecht and Griffin Brady founded it this year.

“I’ve been interested in game design for a couple of years,” Knecht said. “I thought there were going to be a couple of coding clubs when I came to Ballard, but since there was none me and my co-captain of the club decided to make our own.”

The club has overcome various difficulties, such as the low amount of meeting time per week.

“We only have 30 minutes,” Knecht said. “In total we get an hour a week of time together, so we really have to maximize that time. We discussed the whole game idea in I think one or two weeks.”

The club has been able to economize on time, such as by discussing what they will do in future meetings, allowing them to immediately get to work when they meet again. Despite this, Time difficulties have caused the club to change the concept of the game from an astronaut travelling across five planets on their way home to, likely, a similar plot taking place on one planet.

Takahashi said that this caused the club to, instead of using a variety of enemies themed after their respective areas, try to design the enemies according to one theme so it would make sense for them to all appear in one area.

Benjamin Krokower, who teaches the Computer Science and Immersive Media classes, helps Game Dev Club with technical issues alongside the Tech Office. However, despite having had both Brady and Knecht in one of his classes, he mostly takes a support role.

Krokower said that he doesn’t know the club’s daily activities very closely and that the club leaders started and run the club themselves.

The club has had problems with school network filtering, such as non-school computers, which they use to make the game, not being able to use wifi in the room where they program. They often have to step into the hall or use school computers for programming.

“The school, and the district, need to balance student safety with computer science learning,” Krokower said. “They try to strike a balance between ensuring we’re appropriately using the network, and also giving us the resources we need to learn.” 

The club has not yet announced on what platform they will release the game.