Ships and Dynamites: A father and son made video game

My son is five years old now, and as he has got older I have begun to share my love of video games with him. He has taken a keen interest in my last two or three PyWeek entries, as so after the last comp he asked if he could help me make a video game. I told him "sure! why don't you design the game and make the graphics and sound, and I can do the programming". I asked him what the game should be about, what does the player do? He told me "You jump out of a big spaceship and jump over lots of dynamite and then get in another spaceship and shoot all the dynamite with your lasers". Sounded good so far. I asked him to draw me a picture of what the game looked like. He drew this:

I then got him to draw a few additional assets on paper: a dynamite box exploding, the word "level", the numbers 0-9 and a titlescreen for the game. I asked him "what about the player's character before they get into the ship? what do they look like?" He drew me this:

I took all of the pictures he drew, scanned them and then chopped them all up in Gimp. I wrote a quick bit of prototype code in python and pygame with the player running around in the game world, with the big ship in the background, little ships that you can jump in and shoot with, and dynamite blocks. My son gave some feedback on how the levels should be structured and gave the nod of approval.

Next I told him "we are going to need some sound effects ... what sort of sounds do you want in the game?". He made the sounds for the lasers, dynamite explosions and a little jingle for when the player dies. We recorded him making the sounds on my laptop's built-in microphone, and I used Audacity to crop the sounds and perform a bit of basic normalisation and noise filtering, before loading them into the game. "What about music?" I asked. He told me "the music has to go like this: da da da daaa da, da da da daaaa da! ...", so I recorded a snippet and set about making a quick orchestral arrangement around the tune he had hummed in Musescore.

Finally I asked him "So, what are you going to call our game?". He told me "It's called 'Ships and Dynamites' ...". "Shouldn't that be 'Ships and Dynamite'?" I asked. "No, dad ... it's Dynamites" he insisted. "OK fair enough ... Dynamites it is".

This is a brief playthrough of our final game:


It was really fun to do this together, we both had a great time. He has had fun showing his game to friends and cousins, and everyone we have shown so far seems to like the game, and I think he's learnt a bit about logically what has to go into a game, how to get something like this to work etc. If interested, you can download the game here:

ships_and_dynamites.zip (1.2Mb)
Source distribution: requires python and pygame