Game Mod was a six hour long workshop with the objective of showing the participants that it is not required to understand code to experiment and play with it.

The code to be modded.

A version of the atari game ‘Breakout’ was built in Processing for the workshop. Unlike common breakout games, in this version the ball bounces on all four sides of the screen, so the game goes on forever, without pauses. This way the game can be modified to the point where its original gaming references are lost, and still maintain a continuous and endless motion. (A cool side-effect is that the player can dribble with the ball).

Although the code of the version had advanced programming features, like Java classes, it was optimized for easy reading and tweaking. Which wasn’t so hard to do: the use of classes allows a clear view, by breaking the code into various sheets, each one controlling a specific aspect of the game. Also the variables of classes are usually declared at the beginning: the easy-tweaking bit is the first visible thing on the code. One specific thing I did was to write descriptive names of variables and methods (in a human readable way), and in Spanish, the main language of the workshop.

(via game mod)

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