image Tutorial Overview

Today's world depends more and more on computing devices. Learning to program will give you opportunities that you may not otherwise have. Programming is essentially giving a computer (or computing device) a set of instructions. These instructions are written in a language that the computer speaks and understands. However, the language that the computer speaks is in 0s and 1s which are difficult for humans to understand. To simplify this, programming languages that are easier for humans to read and write have been developed. Examples of such languages include C, C++, Java, Python, etc. While programming languages can be quite powerful, they can be difficult to learn. GameChangineer converts natural language , such as English, to code, so that you can more easily see the logic and ideas behind programming and computational concepts in the process.

Every language has its own grammatical rules and syntax (vocabulary that it uses). Although each sentence/statement in a program is simple in itself, collectively they can tell a great story. For example, consider a video game, the goal might be to eliminate all the enemies or rescue a target character. The process through which this is achieved can be told as a game plan. When using natural language to describe such a game program, it is important to write the game plan as specifically as possible. We call such game plans unambiguous. To help you achieve this more easily, we advise that your game plan contains two parts: Setting and Plot. The Setting describes the What and the Plot describes the How.

Setting Plot
Describes the characters and how many of them Describes how the player's character is controlled
Describes which character the player controls Describes how non-player characters move
Describes the characters' initial positions Describes how two characters interact

Even after dividing the game plan into Setting and Plot, there may still be places in your test that are ambiguous or unclear to the computer. For example, "The rabbit flees." is clear to a human because we infer that the rabbit is running away from some predator, such as a fox. But a computer does not know that, so you must describe from whom the rabbit is fleeing. In this example, the sentence "The rabbit flees from the fox." is unambiguous, as it clearly describes whom the rabbit is fleeing.

More tips on writing a clear game plan:

In terms of computational thinking, the four core areas are emphasized in GameChangineer:

Finally, the focus of GameChangineer is on writing clear instructions for a video game. Thus, much of the low-level details can be skipped. For example, the math behind how to make an object flee another object is automatically synthesized for you behind the scenes. This allows you to focus on the big picture without bothering to compute the trajectories, etc. Because the focus is on the high-level instructions, low-level mathematical manipulations should not be in your sentences; writing sentences that attempt to describe low-level mathematical processes is not the intent of this platform.

The rest of the tutorial will go into the details of writing video games using Game Changineer: what things to avoid and the best practices to follow. We invite you to explore, innovate, and create fun games!


Programming Concepts (optional material):
Video games are a great way to learn programming concepts! They can be viewed as a series of actions, divided into frames, as in a movie or cartoon. The computer re-draws the characters over and over again to give the illusion that the characters are moving. Let's say there are 50 frames in a second. The characters only shift slightly from one frame to the next, but as we move quickly through all the frames, the characters look like they are moving. Whether a character is chasing, fleeing, or falling, it follows the same set of action-rules in every frame. Likewise, your program/game-plan only needs to describe the actions for each character for a single frame.



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