Zenva’s Founder Pablo Farias Navarro was recognized by Intel as an Innovator of Tomorrow. In this interview, hear as he shares his story, and how Zenva was inspired by his dream to make learning to code accessible to everyone.

Today, Zenva has inspired over 350,000 students to learn programming and upgrade their development knowledge – regardless of where they live, or whether or not they are connected to the main innovation hubs.

With the access to the most popular, cutting-edge techniques that Zenva provides, discover how our students have been able to reach their development dreams – whether through teaching these skills to others, by expanding their portfolio, or embarking on a freelance career.

Lucas, it’s great to have you here for an interview! To get things rolling, can you tell us a little about how you got into game development? 

So I think I first got a taste for game development playing a 2D MMORPG called Graal Online as a kid (early 2000s). The game was actually way ahead of its time. It was really a game development platform that allowed players to develop their own content and essentially create their own online games. I loved the experience of being involved in the creative process and developed a real passion for pixel art and game development.

After graduating from university (in a totally unrelated field) I decided to do the responsible thing and try to create a browser-based MMORPG?. We eventually did get a functional prototype online but the project ultimately fell apart because of a personal disagreement between myself and the coder I was working with.

Since then I’ve been learning how to code myself. I had pre-ordered Zenva’s HTML5 Game Development Mini-Degree while enrolled in a web development boot camp here in Toronto. The course conveniently arrived a few days after the boot camp ended and so I took the opportunity to jump into Phaser 3.

That sounds like perfect timing – it’s great to see how proactive you’ve been in teaching yourself to code. We were super excited to see your take on the Virtual Pet Game, and how Zenva helped to get you there. Can you tell us more about the courses that you used and how they helped you to create Emoji Pet?

 Yeah I wanted to learn Phaser 3 because I’m really interested in browser games.  Phaser 3 is just being released now so I thought it was a good time to get in.  Since it is so new (and currently incomplete) the documentation isn’t great.  I wanted to find a comprehensive tutorial series and found Zenva’s HTML5 Game Development Mini-Degree.  I think the third project you make in the course is a Virtual Pet.  I wanted to see if I could put my own twist on it and make a virtual pet game using nothing but emoji text characters.

So what was your experience like using the Phaser 3 Framework? 

 It’s really quick and easy to get a game scene up and running in Phaser.  I had never used it before but still found it intuitive and easy to work with.  I can see that there are some really powerful tools in there but the real drawback at the moment is the documentation.

That you managed the framework so easily is very evident in your game – it’s so slick that the only difficulty that players experience is the choice over whether to feed their Emoji Pet salad or ice cream! Was creating the game all ice cream and hamburgers, or were there some challenges that you had to tackle?

So I wanted to work with Emojis mainly for the novelty of it.  I hadn’t heard of anyone using emoji as game sprites before and I wanted to see if it could be done.  This presented a challenge as I had difficulty finding any relevant information.  Thanks to Zenva and the great Phaser community out there I got through it.  I managed to make animations for the emoji character by switching between various emoji characters.  For example the emoji will throw up if you feed it too much junk food ? > ? > ?. It was easy to transform them just like any other sprite.  I even managed to make a background with a scaled-up cityscape emoji ?.

I think my main takeaways are:

1.   Using emoji instead of normal sprites is possible.

2.   Emojis render differently on different devices, which is sort of interesting but ultimately probably a drawback.

3.   Since I don’t have to provide the user with a bunch of image sprites, the game should load more quickly.

All that perseverance definitely paid off! It’s fascinating to hear how versatile you managed to make the Emojis in your game. Now that Emoji Pet is complete, do you have any new projects in the works?

 I’m playing with the idea of a 2D zombie survival side scroller … made with emoji of course?‍.

Thanks so much for joining us for an interview! Before we say goodbye, do you have any words of wisdom for other Zenva students who are having their first crack at game development?

The Phaser community is really great.  If you need support check out the HTML5 Game Devs message board as well as the Phaser Slack Channel.

A huge thanks to Lucas for joining us, and for all the tips and tricks he’s given us! Catch you all next time…

Get ? ? ? by playing Emoji Pet here. 

Yone Moreno Jimenez was one of many students who grabbed this bundle, and he has already worked through several of the courses, and published his creations for the world to see. 

Yone, it’s great to meet you! Could you tell us a little about your background in programming?

Hello. I’ve been programming as part of my Computer Science studies, however I’ve been curious about game development since 2007.

What courses in our Discover Unity Game Development curriculum interested you the most?

The most interesting course for me was Master Unity Game Development – Ultimate Beginner’s Course, because I learned how important vectors and coordinate systems are when creating games.

It was fascinating when the instructor, Pablo Farias Navarro, implemented a system that only allowed the player to jump if it was grounded. He did this by casting a ray from each corner of the player’s box, and he explained the calculations for this in a very friendly way.

Additionally, I enjoyed the course because in each lesson, there are small challenges where you get to put the knowledge into practice, instead of just copying and pasting the content.

I published my version of the 3D Multi-Level Platformer game – ColorPlatform – after making my own modifications to the main screen, the game over screen, and the background music.

It’s fantastic to hear that you were not only able to create the game, but to make it yours! Since completing your platformer, have you worked through any of the other courses in the bundle? 

I’ve also taken the 2D game development courses, and have learned a lot with them. The instructor Glauco Pires does a great job – he works at a good pace, and explains the the concepts behind why he does each step.

So far, I’ve created and published Pong , Plane in the River , and also Space Attackerson the Itch.io game publishing platform.

You’ve taken a wonderfully active approach to your learning! What are your development goals – is game development something that you are interested in pursuing as a career, or is it more of a hobby that you are passionate about? 

So far, I’ve created some games with other artists. Unlucky Charlie is a game centered around following the rhythm of a heartbeat.

Friendly Fire Fly is a co-operative side scroller, where you need to avoid colliding with fire and the enemies.

When it comes to a career, I’m still figuring things out. Although I like the creativity involved with programming, I’m hesitant about coding with only text (as is the case with web development), so now I’m investing one year in learning Unity. I also plan to study game design and development at University next year.

I’m also really interested about using programming to help people with disabilities, like the blind, because I think that the time invested in programming, developing and designing is especially worth it when helping other people. This was inspired from a weekend where I helped to develop an audio game for the blind – you can read all about my experiences doing this here.

That’s a fantastic goal – it’s great that you’re inspired to make games accessible to everyone. Before we leave you, is there any advice that you’d like to offer to other learners and aspiring game developers like yourself? 

Learning to develop a game is interesting and entertaining, but don’t just learn by yourself – join up with at least one other person who shares your interests in development. Try to find projects where you can collaborate, and learn how to work as a team.

Thanks Yone, for that great advice, and for inviting us all to see what game development is like for you. 

Catch you all next time… 

Hey everyone, we’re back with another sweet tale of student success! Today, we’re hearing from Damon Bolesta, and his experience creating his very first game – Donut Boy.

So Damon… tell us about the boy behind the donuts. How’d you get into game development?

I’ve always thought about developing a game ever since I was a kid, but it wasn’t until 2016 that I really made an effort to try and learn how to do it. I had been working as a web developer for a few years and had gotten some JavaScript programming experience under my belt, and I knew that HTML5/JavaScript games were becoming more popular, so one day I just Googled “javascript game engines”, and Phaser popped up a few times. I looked around for a few courses and the Zenva course was one of them, so I decided to work through it, and 2 years later, I had created my first game.

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And now for the donuts behind the boy… You’ve got a pretty unique and quirky concept behind your game. Where’d you get your ideas?

The story of the game itself sort of just fell together. I knew I wanted a common collectable (like coins or rings), and donuts came to my mind pretty quickly. I then thought: “why would there be donuts scattered around everywhere?” Which obviously led me to conclude that there had been a catastrophic explosion at the local donut factory.

I used cropped images of actual faces as the players mainly because I didn’t know how to create animations at all when I first put them in (the game was actually called Face Game for most of development). A lot of individual game ideas came from either early games of my childhood, or just things in my life. For example, the idea to have a bubble weapon came from Milon’s Secret Castle for the NES, where your main weapon is bubbles. I was playing frisbee one day when realized that a frisbee could be a funny weapon.

It’s really cool to hear how something that started as a road block turned into a key aesthetic of your game! Tell us a little more about how you created the game assets – I saw that you used JavaScript, Phaser, and Photoshop, and even composed the music using  Logic Pro X.  What were your experiences using these tools and tech?

I had been using JavaScript for several years, but all of that knowledge was purely for creating website technologies. When I found Phaser, I was excited to use what I knew in a game-making context. I fell in love with it pretty quickly, and once I was familiar with the documentation and common techniques, I was able to implement singular ideas in just a day or two.

I had also been using Photoshop for quite a while, but never for creating pixel art. I’m not the best artist, so doing the art was probably the hardest and most time consuming part of making this game. In the beginning, I was sure I was going to either use pre-existing assets, or use single-colored tiles. But I’m really glad I decided to do it on my own, because I got a little better each day, and by the end of it, not only was my actual artistic ability a little better, but I knew how to create tilesets and spritesheets for animation.

I had been using Logic Pro X for many years to create little pieces of music, so I was very familiar with it already. One of my favorite parts of making this game was creating the music for it, so I hope that people enjoy the music!

It’s great to see how you brought all of those different tools together to create your game – and having heard the music, I think that it creates a great atmosphere for Donut Boy as he vanquishes all of his obstacles (seagulls, cats, and zombies…) in his mission to save the town. Did you have any obstacles that you needed to overcome in order to get the game up and running? And more importantly, how did you conquer them?

The biggest obstacle I had to overcome was definitely own lack of discipline. I started this game in February of 2016, and by the spring of that year, I had a nice little prototype put together. But I wasn’t positive what direction to take it in, and the flurry of ideas I had kept making development more and more intimidating. Realizing that some ideas would take possibly more than a year, and it wasn’t even guaranteed that the ideas would work, and I wasn’t even sure which of several ideas I wanted to work on… it basically killed my motivation to work on the game, and I soon stopped working on it completely.

As time went on, I started to forget how certain things were  programmed, and how things were put together. I entered a really bad cycle of being intimidated to work on it, which made me not work on it, which made me forget more, which made it even more intimidating to work on it again. So I gave up on it. I had convinced myself that maybe game development wasn’t for me.

But one day in about October of that year, I decided that I had to finish what I had started, even if it turned out to be completely terrible. I forced myself to begin the agonizing three-week process of reviewing my code, relearning the fundamentals of Phaser, re-familiarizing myself with the documentation, and referencing back to Pedro’s videos to get me back to where I had left off.

This process was tremendously painful, but equally helpful. It was a good exercise in discipline, and through it I was able to develop a work habit that only got stronger over time, and that was crucial in helping me make consistent progress, and eventually complete my game.

Thanks for your honesty there, Damon – it’s great to remind people that struggling with game development and motivation is normal, but that it’s possible to get through it. You mentioned that re-familiarizing yourself with our courses played a role in keeping you on track. Could you tell us about which of our courses took you from rookie to patisserie-inspired platformer pro? How did they help you to create Donut Boy?

I took The Complete Mobile Game Development Course – Platinum Edition. It was great because each Module of the course has you complete a very simple game, each of a different genre. So not only did I learn about Phaser itself, but I learned about general programming tricks and techniques that are frequently used for a variety of different types of games. Different mechanics that I was familiar with from a players perspective, were shown from a programmer / designers perspective, which resulted in a lot of lightbulb moments for me.

I actually haven’t even completed all of the Modules – since I knew I wanted to create a platformer, by the time I had completed the first 7 Modules, I felt that I had learned what I needed to create the game I wanted. I was able to just continuously expand upon the groundwork that I created with the course and turn it into something that was uniquely mine. The Module format was really helpful in this respect, because I could learn exactly what I wanted without having to sit through the stuff I wasn’t as immediately interested in.

So now that you’ve fixed the Dough-Nutter 4000 and helped save the townsfolk from death-by-sugar coma, what’s next? Do you have any new games in the works?

I actually have already created a new game since I released this one only a month ago! I was so used to working on Donut Boy almost every day for the past few months that I felt a little lost without a project to work on. So I entered a Game Jam on itch.io (where Donut Boy is hosted) where the objective was to create a game in just 3 days.

I was feeling really well-practiced, so I took a stab at it and ended up creating a little game in one weekend. It’s called Final Flowers, and it ended up getting voted as the 4th most Fun game out of the 155 other games that were submitted to the Jam, so I felt really good about that.

It’s been great to hear all about you and the creation of Donut boy. Before we go, do you have any sage words of advice for other Zenva students who are having their first crack at game development?

I think there are two really important things people should keep in mind as they begin game development:

1) It’s Okay If Things Aren’t Done Perfectly
There were a lot of times where I wanted to implement something in my game, but I didn’t know the “right” way to do it. In the beginning, these were roadblocks to me. I didn’t want things to be hacked together, or done inefficiently, or the “wrong” way, so I would avoid doing them at all. But eventually, I decided that if I wanted to make progress, I would have to hack some things in whatever way I could. Sometimes it ended up being a good way to do it; sometimes I discovered a better way and was able to refactor the code down the line. I’m still positive there are fundamental components of my game that, if someone who was more experienced looked at it, would be insulted at the way I did it. But in the end, my code was causing the intended effect that I wanted in the game – and when you’re just starting out, that’s all that matters.

2) Anticipate Motivation Fading
I learned a lot about the relationship between motivation and discipline when making this game. When you’re feeling motivated – usually towards the beginning of a project – the work is easy. My motivation was fueling my work ethic so intensely that it felt like cheating. It wasn’t work at all, it was pure joy to be creating, learning, and watching something grow.
But at a certain point, that motivation will fade. It just will. It will go away, and the work won’t seem that fun anymore. It becomes work. It’s at that point when you have to incorporate discipline. You have to force yourself to work on it when you don’t want to. Especially when you realllly don’t want to. You have to create actual plans for yourself so that you have little goals to reach for. Make progress every day. Create a positive work routine for yourself. I had a system where, as soon as I was done my work for the day, I would take my fully-charged laptop to a coffee shop, and I would work on my game until my battery was at 5%. Sometimes I would make progress on my to do list. Sometimes I ended up working on something that I wasn’t planning on, even if that meant just plotting something new out in my head. Either way, I was making progress every day. It was through discipline that I was ultimately able to complete my first game.

In the end, the most important thing is that you can complete a project. One completed project is better than 100 incomplete ideas. So, start small, stick with it, and duct tape features together if you have to. You can do it!

And there you have it, folks! A huge thanks to you, Damon, for such a detailed and honest look into your development process.

Think that you’ve got what it takes to prevent the town from overdosing on sugar? Play Donut Boy here.

And if you feel like graduating from town hero to almighty saviour of planets, check out Damon’s latest game, Final Flowers.

Breeze through our interview with Jason, who completed the course Unity Game Development – Build a First Person Shooter (authored by Glauco Pires in collaboration with Pablo Farias Navarro), and see the experience he had developing a his zombie-style game for MacOS!

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Hi Jason! We are ecstatic on having the chance to interview you over here on GameDev Academy! Additionally, congratulations on being both persistent and determined, with it having paid off in finally having Last Survivor published to the MacOS store! What is your game about, and what technologies was it built with?

Hi everyone! Just a quick introduction about myself — my name is Jason Lai, and I’m currently a high school senior at Culver Academies, IN.

Thank you for having me and featuring Last Survivor. The game is primarily a zombie FPS game, in which the player must use their weapon to destroy all deadly zombies within the town. The game itself is built with Unity3D, and the programming was done with the C# programming language.

Wow, that’s amazing Jason! You brought your game from start to finish all the while tending to your studies as a high school student. We’d like to know more about that! For now, why was MacOS chosen as the platform, as opposed to iOS or Windows?

Personally, I am a MacBook user. Because of that, I decided to develop the game for the MacOS platform since I’m already very familiar with the operating system.

In the future, I will definitely try to make my game compatible with the Windows operating system. However, I might not develop for the iOS platform because the game does require a mouse and keyboard to play!

Setting your starting point where you’re most comfortable is definitely a good way to get started, Jason. We’re curious to know — how did you manage your time to be able to complete and publish the game? Are there any tips or advice you’d suggest to other students on managing time and game publishing?

As a high school student that has school work, athletic practice, and college applications to complete, I consider efficient time management as a very important tool that helps me to complete and publish games.

Each time, before I start to work on my game, I write down a list of things on a piece of paper that is ordered from the most important item to the least important item. From there, I try my best to accomplish it all within a given amount of time.

Generally, during the weekdays, I’d give myself about an hour or two for game development. Sometimes I may stay up until 2 in the morning simply trying to fix an audio problem. However, on the weekends I can spend as much time as possible working on my games.

The tip I’d give to any students reading this, is to not overspend time trying to solve a particularly puzzling problem. At times, you just need to take a break and relax — think about something else aside from the game. By the time you start to fix that same puzzling problem the next day, you’ll probably be able to find out the solution.

P.S. One time, I had spent 5 hours solving an issue regarding the weapon’s bullet, but eventually I found out that I forgot to capitalize a letter in a method’s name.

That’s incredibly insightful advice, Jason, and I’m sure anyone could benefit from it! Having published your game while being a high school student, it really is a testament that anyone can achieve the same, with the right determination and time management.

Speaking of puzzling problems, what was the biggest technical challenge you faced? And how did you overcome it?

I think, for me, that the biggest technical challenge was adding more features to the game. By the time that I finished completing the course in Zenva, there was no map, no pause, no menu, background music, etc. For a student like myself that did not have a lot of previous coding experience. I searched online for help a lot. For example, I had visited Unity’s community page, the Apple Developer Forums, some game designer’s YouTube channel, and other coding websites for help.

Sometimes, a one place doesn’t hold all of the answers, but that’s great that you took the initiative to find the answers to your questions and implemented those additional features. One last question for you, how did our Zenva Academy courses help you in your game?

The course that I completed was Unity Game Development – Build a First Person Shooter. This course was extremely beneficial to me as it not only taught me a lot of new knowledge regarding Unity and the C# programming language, but it also explained many basic game design concepts such as Object Pooling, Nav Mesh, Collision Detection, etc.

I strongly encourage students that like FPS games to take this course, as you might be able to make your own version of Counter-Strike in the future!!

And cut! That completes our interview with Jason, creator of the Last Survivor game for MacOS.  Little known secret that we’ll let you in on — it initially took a couple of tries for the game to be successfully approved by Apple due to a minor glitch in the initial submission.

However, Jason’s perseverance and determination paid off and he now has a published work in the Apple App Store.

Jason, we truly appreciate having you here to tell us about your journey in conquering Apple’s App Store, and bringing your game to fruition. We wish you the best of luck in your future endeavors and college!

Interested in creating your own games? Check out the Game Development Mini-Degree

Read on through to find out more about Hamza, a student who completed the Virtual Reality Mini-Degree, and the experience he had developing a virtual reality game for Android!

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Hi Hamza! We are thrilled to be able to interview you over here on GameDev Academy, and we’d like to congratulate you on pushing the boundary to publishing Apocalypse Time VR. It certainly looks great and we do enjoy the Pixel Art Minecraft-esque feel to it! In fact we’d love to know, what tools, frameworks, or technologies did you use in creating the game?

Hi there everyone! Thank you for having me and featuring my game. I actually used Unity to create most of the game, and I also utilized 3D Slash (which is a modeling program) for the graphics. Lastly, I also did happen to use a bit of AutoCAD!

That’s very interesting to hear, Hamza! A very peculiar tidbit that you had incorporated AutoCAD into your game, but very creative nonetheless. How was the experience in developing it?

My experience was awesome, and it was actually pretty easy to make, and I was well-prepared to do so. The game was actually created as a submission for a Game Jam.

I previously completed the Virtual Reality Mini-Degree and it is an absolutely awesome collections of courses on virtual reality game development. They are probably the best courses that I have ever taken! I learned a lot and that helped me greatly, almost all of my understanding of Unity came from this Mini-Degree.

Tip: If you are ever wondering how create your app icon, simply take a screenshot of what you want your icon to be and then just search for an icon maker in the Google Play Store. From there it should be easy enough to make it.

Wow, that’s awesome to know that you started this as a submission for a Game Jam! Virtual reality presents an exciting opportunity to develop for a rapidly evolving platform. What advice would you give to students currently enrolled in Zenva courses, or those developing a project for their first time?

Yes! Virtual reality is indeed exciting and there’s always new things going on in the world of development for it, from new frameworks for development to the platforms that can run virtual reality becoming much more accessible.

The advice that I have for anyone currently enrolled in Zenva courses, and for those in the midst of completing their own projects, is do not give up — ever! If you don’t understand something, like how something works or functions, just ask. In addition, be regular and consistent at what you do, it will help in memorizing the commands you use, the content you learn, and ultimately finishing the course.

And there we have it everyone! Thank you Hamza for joining us for this insightful and informative discussion on Apocalypse Time VR. We truly appreciate having you here to tell us about the journey you had in developing this awesome game. I am sure we could all benefit from your advice on being consistent, and asking questions — whenever you might be unsure of something. It never ever hurts to ask!

If you have a Google Cardboard (or anything Virtual Reality Headset for Android), be sure to give Hamza’s published game Apocalypse Time VR a try! Immerse yourself in the world of virtual reality, and who knows, you might be inspired to create the next big craze!

Interested in creating your own games? Check out our Game Development courses

Subsequent to that, we also just finished interviewing the winner of that very hackathon.

Read on below to hear the experience of competing in — and winning — the very first Zenva Phaser Hackathon, with Stefan Neidig!

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Hi Stefan! It is great to have you here, and congratulations on having won the first ever Phaser Hackathon that we held! We’re sure our readers are excited to hear from you so we’ll get rolling — what is your background in game development?

Hi Chris! Thank you, I appreciate it. My first steps were made on a learning computer, which my mother gave me at the age of 11. It had a module where programs could be written in BASIC. The first game I made on that computer was a variant of Who wants to be a millionaire?, which had several hard-coded questions. There was no title or winning screen, and the user interface was very minimal, having just a few lines.

However, it was a start and my passion for programming has been unbroken this that first day. I soon realized that I couldn’t do what I really wanted using just BASIC, so I turned my attention to Pascal, HTML, and finally C++. This was the tech stack I used for a while, and I did projects with game/graphic engines like Irrlicht 3D.  I spent a lot of time patching and adding to the engine, but I also managed to create a few games such as a simple Connect 4 game and a Bomberman clone.

I also worked with a few other game engines, like Ogre 3D, LOVE, Unity 3D, and PhaserJS. I also learned a few other programming languages and studied Computer Science. My bachelor thesis was on the field of artificial intelligence.

Soon after earning my masters degree, I worked with a small startup, and I’ve sinced move to Appcom Interactive as a software engineer/software architect . We fulfill projects for big companies in Germany.

Wow! You’ve certainly had a long journey with game and software development — and you got your start quite early! On your journey, were there any Zenva courses you took that helped you along the way?

Zenva certainly did help me along the way! I took the course Advanced Game Development with Phaser — Build Multiplayer Games. It was this course that gave me a better understanding on how to interact with the Phaser game engine.

I made a big game with Phaser for a client, which included a highscore server. It took several months, and the code was quite complicated in the end, since it was also my first game with Phaser.

The course taught me how to use game states properly, and I use the concepts I learned for boot and loading screens to this day, and I certainly used it for Bots.

Furthermore, I learned how to use prefabs, which was a concept familiar from Unity 3D. Prefabs were both a blessing and a curse, since they help to generalize methods and increase development speed, but they also led to more files which was a negative in terms of the hackathon. By the submission deadline of the hackathon, my file size was greater than 800 KB, so I messed with the code and minified the assets to meet the 500 KB limit.

In Bots, I used what I learned from the Fruit Ninja Clone in the course, and the spawner classes were widely used.

Very insightful, we are certainly glad to have been able to be there for you along the way, and in your success with the hackathon! We’ve spoken a lot about of your experiences and past — let’s look forward, what are your plans for the future, in terms of development?

My plans are to take a step back on development, and to do more on an architecture and conceptual level. As I mentioned before, I am also a software architect with Appcom Interactive. Naturally, the focus is on requirements engineerig, developing an architectural concept for projects, writing documentation, and supporting developers in implementing the architecture.

However, in my free time, I still work with Phaser on a mostly conceptual level. I still have ideas for some smaller games I’d like to do in the future. One will be a clone of the well-known Chocobo World featuring a very interesting battle concept. Another one will be a PvP game, having a battle-system based on Conveys Game of Life. The main problem is that I am a plain developer without the slightest talent for designing. Thus, I usually have to gather all of the assets, which is a bit difficult for obvious reasons. Projects like Kenney.nl or Opengameart.org are valuable for people like me, and we highly appreciate them!

That sounds like a great plan! Software architecture is quite the natural step, and those objectives you have set are definitely within your reach. What advice would you give to developers, such as our students at Zenva, who are currently taking courses?

Learn by doing! It sounds cheesy, but this is how I believe it works. Watch the courses. Figure out the big concept behind them, and learn from them. Then adapt and build your own game. In the course I mentioned above, Advanced Game Development with Phaser — Build Multiplayer Games, one can learn about creating a Fruit Ninja game and a Bomberman clone, as well as a fantasy strategy game. These can be very good starting points for your very own game.

Try to free your mind and come up with fresh ideas, which seem like crazy at the first glance, but can make your games unique. Having a inventive concept or an innovative variation of a known concept is a key factor for success. Once you setup your game, learn from the audience. You don’t write games for yourself, but for others. Listen to them and try to make them as happy as possible, at the same time doing what you love.

Those are some wise words and sentiments Stefan, thank you for sharing them with us and our students. We’re sure everyone can appreciate your views, with the success you’ve found yourself. One last question, you spoke about unique and creative ideas — where did you get the idea for your unique game, Bots?

My first idea for the hackathon was actually a trading card game where you’d have to build and level up tanks. Soon after I learned about the asset policy, which ruled this idea out, since there was no good card template on the listed resources. So I browsed through the free assets on kenney.nl and found the robots asset set. Then I had this idea where you drive through a huge world fighting other robots.

Furthermore I am a huge fan of Slither.io, which gave me the idea for the goal of the game. You have to fight others in order to become better and to get stronger. Other concepts likes bosses, earthquakes, meteors, drops, and many more are well-known from other games. I played many games during this period to get more ideas I could squeeze into this game. Fortunately I managed to add most of them in time and in budget (with regards to file size).

That’s very inventive and resilient of you! How you had one idea, but the hackathon guidelines made you change your idea, and you won! I see what you previously meant, with giving your own creative spin on an existing game concept to make it yours, and that’s certainly what happened here.

And there you have it folks! What a great, fun, and unique submission that Bots was, and led to Stefan taking the 1st place prize home. Stefan, thank you for the insight into your background and experience with game development, and software engineering in general. It was truly a pleasure to hear from you, someone who works day in and day out in the field itself, and not to mention the winner of our first ever hackathon!

Be sure to check out Stefan at his sites below!

GitHub|Twitter|Itch|XING|LiveEdu
AppCom Interactive|RPDev

Want to get your start in game development, and go onto win a hackathon someday like Stefan? See below for more.

Interested in creating your own games? Check out our game development courses

We appreciate all of the effort, time, and hard work everyone put into their Phaser games.

Without further ado, here are all of the amazing games that our awesome community and entrants submitted

Bots by Stefan Neidig (1st Place Winner)

Robots? Sounds fun. Clashing robots with awesome names? Even better! In yet another unique demonstration of the capabilities of Phaser, our 1st place winner Stefan Neidig created a game modeled around the idea of crashing robots. And what a fun idea that is!

Get behind the wheel of a robot and score some points by defeating fellow robots! You face off against what seem to be AI-controlled enemies, and you get a small HUD indicating the map, where you are on it, and where enemies are.  The goal of it is to survive this robotic royal rumble. This submission was a fantastic demonstration of the amazing capabilities of Phaser, and was implemented with an incredibly unique style of gameplay in mind. For that, Stefan took home the 1st place prize.

Check out the 1st place winner, Bots, on Stefan’s GitHub.

Oblivious by Jorge Noro (2nd Place Winner)

In yet another mind-bending game using Phaser, 2nd place winner Jorge Noro helps teach us that being oblivious has its consequences!

The objective of this game is to navigate to each subsequent level safe and sound — but there’s a twist! Your line of sight moves along as you do, meaning you can only see parts of the map that are within your general vicinity. It works similar to using Flash in the Pokemon games, in that the area that is lit up moves along with you. Make it through without bumping into any enemies and you can be on your way to winning! This was a very unique and fun spin on what can be done with Phaser, and we thank Jorge for creating this puzzling game!

Find Oblivious by Jorge on his GitHub.

Dungeon Lurer by Caio Marchi Gomes do Amaral (3rd Place Winner)

On the subject of head-scratchers, we present to your our 3rd place winner, Dungeon Lurer! This submission takes minimalism to a whole new level, with its clean and simple interface. However, its style of gameplay is also unique, since you control the tiny red guy seen in the above picture.

Your objective as the player is to remove the obstacle in your way (the small spiked object in the middle of the screen), but without causing harm to your player. So how do you remove the obstacle? Simple, you lure your doppelganger (the small sprite that looks similar to you) to do it for you! The doppelganger mimics your movements, but mirrors those movements in the opposite direction.

It takes a little bit of playing around to get used to, but is quite fun once you get the hang of it. Thank you for this awesome mind-bending game Caio!

See Dungeon Lurer on Caio’s GitHub.

UFOs Attack Zenva by Daniel Danielecki

Help save Zenva! This cool alien-themed game calls on you — the player — to help save us over at Zenva, by blasting away some aliens looking to attack our headquarters! By the way, our headquarters has sweet laser beams, did you know that? Bet you didn’t!

Anyhow, this was a fun game that demonstrated some of the capabilities of Phaser. We enjoyed defending Zenva, and we could only take so many hits before the aliens began to do their damage. We’d like to thank Daniel for this awesome take on the classic Defender style games.

Be sure to check out UFOs Attack Zenva on Daniel’s GitHub.

Galactic Defender by Wasim Kabir

Woah! Defender style games sure are popular picks for the Phaser! In this similarly themed shooter, you take the responsibility of not just defending Zenva (because Zenva is in this galaxy, right?), but defending the entire galaxy!

We definitely enjoyed this sweet take on the classic space shooter genre. It was a quick and fun demonstration of what you can whip up with Phaser, some free game assets, and some spare free time. We appreciate this neat little game, and its simplicity had us considering it as one of the winning submissions.

Try out Galactic Defender on Wasim’s GitHub.

Bunny Hop! by Tina Legere

Don’t trip! In this fun little platformer-style game, you take control of a purple bunny who is simply doing what he does best — hopping his way home!

We enjoyed playing this game and it was definitely a great break from having to save Zenva from aliens and defending the galaxy. Talk about stress, huh? This bunny-themed game was definitely a fun and relaxing game. Thank you for showing us your creative skills with Phaser Tina!

Jump around with Bunny Hop! on Tina’s GitHub.

Home Run Baseball Derby Deluxe by Edgard Collante

Is your favorite part of baseball batting a home run? Then look no further! This sweet little game allows you to become the baseball player of your dreams, just keep your eye on the ball and swing. We enjoyed testing this game out, provided by Edgard.

See Home Run Baseball Derby Deluxe for yourself on Edgard’s GitHub.

Little PJ The Hero of Guam by Kenneth Banico

Can you save the beachy area of Guam? You sure can try! In this entertaining game submission by Kenneth Banico, you defend your part of the beach from bugs invading your little area. Perhaps once you defeat them all, you’ll be able to simply relax on the beach!

The bugs do have a large amount of life, compared to the damage your blasts will inflict on them. As a result, it’s quite easy to get overwhelmed by near-immune bugs, but hey, at least you’re at the beach! Thank you for this submission Kenneth.

Take at look a Little PJ The Hero of Guam on Kenneth’s GitHub.

VAVO by Stephan Max

Enjoy puzzles? Then this game may be your cup of tea! In this submission by entrant Stephan Max, you line up and match shapes. It can get tricky as the difficulty increases, but is a fun — as well as perplexing– game, and one that diverges from games typically made using the Phaser framework.

Thank you Max for bringing us this brain-teaser, and stumping us at certain points in the game. Definitely a nice break and a cool take on Phaser.

Solve the mind-bending VAVO on Stephan’s GitHub.

And there you have it folks, all of the wonderful game submissions that we received from our very talented entrants. We’d like to thank each and every one of you for showing us your best and for having participated in our first ever Phaser Hackathon.

Be sure to keep an eye out for a future hackathon announcement.

Interested in creating your own games? Check out The Complete Mobile Game Development Course

Follow our interview with this successful Zenva Academy student below, and hear about his experiences in this clever and captivating published game!

Hi Salvatore! Glad to have you here, the General Election Game obviously has a dimension of politics imbued in it. What role do you feel video games have in politics? And the reverse, do you feel politics have any role being in a game?

Hi! I’m glad to be here! And to begin, it is an unfortunate fact that most people are disenfranchised by politics. I believe this is mostly because citizens feel they’re being ignored and cannot find someone that can represent them. Because of this, they pay less and less attention to politics in general, even though there may be a political worth their attention, such as Bernie Sanders or Jeremy Corbyn.

I think that a political video game, and the message it brings, can help change the situation by engaging people with politics again.

Some think that the video game industry is not supposed to get involved in this matter, but I disagree. At the end of the day, what politicians do affect the whole of us, as a society, so every creative industry should be involved in the matter — be it the music industry, the film industry, or the video game industry. The more people that are educated about political issues, the better.

Wow, that’s a very wise and insightful sentiment regarding video games, and how they can be instrumental in helping citizens become engaged in politics. On that notion, why did you decide to create a game with underlying political themes, as opposed to another medium?

There are already many political videos, and politics-enthused memes, on the internet, but they lack interactivity. Because of the interactive nature of a video game, I thought it might help push people into becoming more proactive in how they approach politics. An example of this would be through talking with friends and family about the political issues brought up by the game. This in itself would already be an excellent achievement for The General Election Game.

That’s a very great and inspiring reason for developing this innovative and motivating game. I’m sure anyone who plays it will have a question or two on the issues brought to light by it. What frameworks and tools did you use in developing the game? Any particular Zenva resource that helped you in your journey?

From a code perspective, and the game being browser based, I decided to build the website front-end using VueJS. VueJS is a fantastic UI library that is easy to use as jQuery, yet very lightweight and extremely powerful. I also included Vuex — a centralized state management for VueJS — to keep track of the score of the current user, and then saved all of the data using Firebase. Then, I rendered a real-time collective score table, so you can actually see the score updating immediately after a player finishes a game. 

For the building process and asset management, I used Webpack, and for the animations I used AnimeJS which is much smaller than GSAP, and it integrates very well with PhaserJS.

Regarding the creative process, I worked alongside a phenomenal Fine Art specialist, Ixchel Prada, that provided all of the sketches for the characters and enemies, and a skilled Motion Designer, Antonio Oggiaru, that converted the sketches for Illustrator and Photoshop so that they were ready to be animated with After Effects and Spine.

Other programs used in the development of the game were Tiled Map and TexturePacker, two invaluable tools for building maps and exporting game assets such as images and sprites.

Of course, none of this would have been possible without the excellent The Complete Mobile Game Development Course by Pablo Navarro. When I was first introduced to PhaserJS, I was overwhelmed by the size of the API, and also by the fact that I had 0 experience in making video games. You can thus imagine how happy I was to find out that Pablo had made such a detailed course regarding the PhaserJS library. Dring the course, I discovered that Pablo was not only teaching the PhaserJS API, but he was also teaching how to structure the game, and most importantly, how to think like a game developer.

Problems that would have taken me hours to solve were explained easily and in a matter of minutes. I definitely suggest the course to anyone who would like to embark in the journey towards developing a web based game.

We appreciate the thorough answer there, Salvatore! Definitely many modern technologies used in the development of your game, befitting of a game making a statement about modern politics. Is there any advice you’d give to other Zenva students, who might also be on the same journey to develop their own app, game, or project?

Considering the pace at which Javascript is progressing, I think that almost everyone right now is feeling demotivated by the sheer amount of information that needs to be learned. This phenomenon is known as “Javascript fatigue”, and I am definitely a victim of it. 

What I suggest to any prospective student, is to try and be up-to-date whenever possible, but also concentrate on what you can deliver with your current skill set. Develop as many games as you want, and never ever leave them incomplete, always finish what you started.

That’s definitely a true statement there! There indeed always seems to be a new and innovative framework, style, or technology that comes out every so often. Fatigue and a sense of being overwhelmed is a real thing, but it definitely helps to set your eyes on a goal and focus on it. One last question if you don’t mind Salvatore, but are there any lessons you’ve learned in this latest development experience? If so, what are they?

Yes, I’ve learned that one should not underestimate the marketing aspect of one’s game, because advertising your video game can be as difficult as developing the game itself. In addition, it would be best to have a targeted set of people play your game as early as possible, so that you have immediate feedback on what could or could not work, especially regarding the game play.

We wholeheartedly agree! Thank you for the thought-provoking and brilliant insight, Salvatore! We greatly enjoyed hear about your experiences and your motivations behind them.

It was awe-inspiring and captivating to hear your thoughts on the intersection of politics and video game development, and how each can make use of the other. Any medium that helps individuals become more participative in the world around them — especially government and politics — should be used to do so.

Be sure to check out Salvatore’s hilarious, yet clever, politically-themed game The General Election Game over on its home page. Feel free to help support the game by liking them on Facebook as well on The General Election Game on Facebook!

Interested in creating your own games? Check out The Complete Mobile Game Development Course

Big thanks to everyone who participated! Huge congrats to the winning entries:

1. Stefan Neidig with Bots
2. Jorge Noro with Oblivious
3. Caio Marchi Gomes do Amaral with Dungeon Lurer

Stay tuned for articles featuring all games + interview to Stefan.

***

Hi everyone! We at Zenva are happy to announce our first ever Phaser Hackathon! We are excited to see the creative and fun games we know you guys are capable of making using the awesome Phaser HTML5 development framework. See below for details!

Key Dates

Here is some important information to keep an eye on

Participating is entirely free. You don’t need to be enrolled in our courses to join.

Zenva Phaser Hackathon

Goal and Game Topic

The topic is entirely free. The goal is to create a fun and interactive online game using Phaser to spread awareness about this wonderful framework, and how our courses can help aspiring developers achieve their game development goals.

Prizes – 1st Place

Prizes – 2nd and 3rd Places

Prize for all submissions

Game Specifications

Here are the specification requirements for the game submission

Asset Guidelines

On incorporating audio and visual assets into the game, the following should be adhered

Judging Criteria

Submission Form

To enter, please complete the online submission form located here

ANYONE can join this hackathon! You don’t need to be enrolled in any of our courses

Best of luck to all, and we’re rooting for each and every one of you!