This week in class!

Hooray! The Ventura County Star ran a great article on our video game class today. You can read the full article here.

After basking in the glow of their glory, the kids are gonna roll up their sleeves and do some intensive learning this week.

They've got a lot to learn about the LittleBigPlanet Level Editor but they're smart, I'm sure they're up to the challenge!

EARTHs class... Friday the 13th style!

This week in the EARTHs game design class, the students focused on team work. Focused might be a little loose a term as we had guests that day... a reporter and photographer from the Ventura County Star newspaper who had come to check out the class. I'll post the article when it goes live! (Thanks VCS for coming out and talking to us!)



With the help of the Hawaiian hat, we the kids drew names to determine the design teams for the rest of the class. Friday the 13th weirdness was in the air as the students made some odd-defying draws to pair up their teams.

With their teams matched up, the students then worked on coming up with a story genre for their level and some potential story beats. They included:


Pacific theatre combat (which will be fun to see how they create a level without any shooting!)


Hearts (and villages burn) in Romantic Horror


Video Game themed action with heroes trapped in a virtual world


Techno-Thriller with heroic computer hacking


and Meat-Evival Times complete with cows in shining armor! A really cool and diverse selection of genres. I'm looking forward to seeing what they do with them!

Finally, the students got their hands on LittleBigPlanet where they roared through the two-player tutorial missions! (I think they were just happy to play games and take a break from all of the thinking!) So far, so good!

Next week: MAPS!

Robot in the Corner Podcast interview

So about a month ago, I gave an amazingly fantastic interview with the boys at "Robot in the Corner" (Titus, Wes and Dean) who do a podcast for Game Informer's website.

I was on fire. I was hilarious (if I do say so myself), I was doing voices, I was telling stories... and at the end of the 2 hour interview, the RitC guys told me the show didn't record.



Flash forward a month and I finally got around to take 2 of the interview. It's a fun interview in which we learn, we laugh... dare I say... we love video games.

Listen to it HERE! NOW!

This week in class...

The first week of EARTHs video game design class went pretty well - at least according to my kids - When I asked them what their favorite part of the class was, I was releaved when they said it was activities they did and not just that they got to play arcade games before the class started.

Highlights of the class included when one of the students gave an incredibly accurate description of what an oscilloscope does and how it works, when the class decided that "kung-fuing" was an appropiate game genre and when no one fought over the game controllers but all patiently took turns. (I was really proud of them and I'm not even their Dad!)

So, what's going on this week? Here's the sneak preview:

This week, we're going back in to ancient Greece to learn about genre...

... to a galaxy far far away* to learn about story...

... and take a page or two from a certain video game design book on how to write a story.

I'm looking foward to it!

* Oh, by the way, May the Fourth be with you!