Game Development with Greenfoot: Class Projects

In my high school class we've started developing some games using the Greenfoot framework for Java. We have three teams of four students, each working on one game. We ended last semester with each student creating a proposal for a game and presenting it to the class. After the proposals were given, the class members each voted secretly on the games they would like to develop, listing all the ones proposed from the one they're most interested in working on to the one they're least interested in.

The voting itself was interesting. I was surprised by the number of students who did not vote for their own game as their top choice, or even in their top 6. Only 4 students voted for their own game first, and one other voted for their own as their #2 choice. The rest all voted themselves down below #6.

We had one game that several people liked, but the creator didn't. Otherwise, the games that drew the top votes were only ones that the creator chose as their #1 pick. When I was putting together the teams, it was pleasant that everyone got on a team developing one of their top 3 picks. In fact, 8 of the class members are working on their #1 pick.

Each team is headed by the game's creator, who takes the role of producer in the team.

The games that got selected for development are:

Day 3
Day 3 is planned to be a side-view arcade shooter with stick figure graphics.

Farm Frenzy
Also known as "The Purple Piggy Game", this is an arcade maze game.

Off-Road Xtravagaanza
A side-scrolling motorcycle simulation, this is probably the most technically challenging of the games to implement under Greenfoot.

Each of the teams has gotten off to a good start. As you can see from the links above, two of the teams have gotten development blogs started, and the third isn't far behind (they've had some team members absent, slowing their progress a bit.) We're presently interleaving our work on the games in Greenfoot with lessons on Java and Greenfoot. So far this has been working out well, though we're still at a very early stage at this point.

One of my biggest fears has been poor workload balancing among the team members. So far the teams have been managing this well on their own. Some of the class members combine a "take charge" mentality with strong skills in both programming and art, so my fear was that they'd be doing the work while the others stand around wondering what exactly they're supposed to be doing. Fortunately enough of the class members feel like they've got something to contribute to their projects that they haven't been feeling left out.

With respect to Greenfoot I've been able to largely concentrate on its mechanisms for teaching and developing objects in our class's formal lecture. With the features of the API, I've been able to simply point students in the direction of the API documentation, programming manual, tutorials and videos for Greenfoot and leave the rest up to them.

The Macs we have in the lab have been the most popular systems for development. We only have four, and they get mobbed. Then, at any given time, we have another 4 Windows XP systems in use, as well as 2-3 systems booted with a Ubuntu LiveCD (mostly for running The Gimp.)