The Monarch School
'Heroes of Gardevioria' Video Game Mentoring Project
Jon was given the opportunity to volunteer in a computer game club at the Monarch School, a school for students with neurological differences. He started to volunteer in October when Bouncing Pixel was still forming, and shortly after found it trivial to get Mckee excited about volunteering as well. Which is good because Jon is horrible at everything artistic. Together they set out with a goal of taking the students in the club through the process of making a video game.
Once a week (with a few exceptions, sometimes work would get in the way) they went to the school. The students started by proposing game ideas that they wanted to see created. The ideas were refined and eventually narrowed down into one type of game. A medieval game. From there they talked about what type of gameplay would work best and settled on a top-down turn-based game. Once those details were agreed upon the story was fleshed out more with a common core being developed that each student could create a quest around. They created maps, came up with character concepts, names, drawings, and dialog for their quests. They helped each other out when they ran into trouble or needed ideas.
Jon and Mckee helped guide the students through the process but left the decisions up to the students. The programming was done by Jon, Mckee digitized the artwork and filled in any small gaps in assets where there was not time in the club for the students to finish. Everything got cleaned up and the game was finished as-is at the beginning of May.
We would like to thank the other partners of Bouncing Pixel for encouraging this sort of behavior, the Monarch School for the opportunity to work with the students, Laura Rosenbaum and the other teachers for helping us with everything we needed, and especially the students ( Khalid Al-Alawi, Anthony Grichuk, Riley Simpson, Jacob Lower, Stevo Broussard, Nathan Schwabenland, Edward Ramos, Sam Johnson ) for putting up with us and working hard throughout the school year.
We had a great time and hope that everyone enjoys the game!
Bring it on-eth!
Knave.
-- Jon and Mckee
