Year 9 Game Development
Overview
Students learn the fundamentals of game development using Python and Pygame by building a series of small, playable 2D games. Starting with a classic Pong build, they explore input handling, movement and collision detection, then progress to features such as gravity and jumping, timers and game states, scoring and lives and simple UI. The course follows the Building Digital Solutions process: define problems, design algorithms and interfaces, develop working software, evaluate against success criteria, collaborate and manage projects.
Students share their finished games at the end of the semester at a game expo.
What do you do?
- Learn and practice using basic game mechanics.
- Define a game brief, success criteria and constraints for a simple 2D game.
- Develop games in Python using Pygame: sprites, classes, functions, collisions, basic physics (gravity), timers, scoring, levels and polish.
- Evaluate via testing and debugging, player feedback and iteration
What skills do you develop?
Computational thinking skills through designing, building and developing digital solutions.
Requirements
No prior coding experience is required; resources and activities are scaffolded from first principles. The subject lays strong foundations for VCE Applied Computing. If you have prior experience, you will have the opportunity to challenge yourself and build something at your level.
Things you can do now
Install VSCode
Do a python tutorial on GROK: