Library Subject Guides
You've probably played games, whether digital or physical, but have you thought about how you can use them creatively to engage audiences and make fun experiences? We'll explore ways you can use games and different ways of making them.
Games are fun, but they can also be useful ways of communicating ideas and concepts to people (whilst they have fun). Educational games can teach you things whilst you play, and informative games might open your eyes to different perspectives and ideas.
If you want to create a game, whether just for fun or to communicate your work or research in a new way, you're probably going to need to use some kind of coding. This is so you can tell the computer how your game should work: what the user needs to see and be able to do, and how the game should react to their actions.
Our Coding Practical Guide covers the basics of coding. If you want to start making a game, you might want to try block-based coding with Scratch, which gives you a game screen you can customise and 'blocks' of code to put together, or start learning another coding language if you want to create your game exactly how you want it.
You might also want to create a quiz. You could use a coding language to do this, or you might want to use a specific quiz or form tool to do this. Our forms & surveys guide has more information on using these - try using options to display certain blocks if someone picks a particular choice if you want to create more of a sense of personalisation or adventure.
One useful game creation tool is GDevelop, which is a tool for creating a range of games including platformers, 2D games, interactive presentations, and more. You can use it in a web browser or download the application on your device, and then you build stages and add media and use its logic-based commands to set up how your game works.
GDevelop is great if you've progressed beyond Scratch or want something more comprehensive, without having to learn how to use a more complex game engine. See the 'Making games with GDevelop' slides for an introduction:
You might want to create games that are more complex than those you can make with simple coding or quiz formats. For that, you'll typically use a game engine, which help you design a game with building it completely from scratch. Though there are many game engines out there, two of the most popular ones at the moment are Unity and Unreal Engine.
If you're working on a project that needs game creation and you don't know how to use a suitable tool, you may need to ensure you have the budget for games designers and programmers. Think about your needs before you decide on a game output so you can be realistic with what you might create.
As part of our digital creativity workshops, we've run a session on games and interactive stories, exploring examples of interesting games and stories and how you would go about creating simple games and interactive stories using Scratch and Twine. The slides for the session are below.
Forthcoming sessions on :
There's more training events at:
