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Liam O'Brien being presented with his prize by Irish Computer Society deputy CEO, Tom O'Sullivan.

Ardnacrusha youth’s golden game

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AN Ardnacrusha youth has claimed first prize in the junior category of the Scratch Coding national finals.

Liam O’Brien, who is a first-year pupil at St Munchin’s College, Limerick, developed a Golden Pixel RPG game, involving a man who is on a quest for the Golden Pixel. The game triumphed in the first to third-year age level for second-level students.

In the game, the man fights monsters, completes quests, earns coins, buys or wins upgrades, conquers castles, plays minigames and unlock levels and defeat bosses in his quest for the golden pixel. The game is divided up into three stages – grassland, desert and beach.

The man has health, money and strength. His health is what keeps him alive. He starts with 20 units of health and loses his health when enemies hit. Each type of enemy has different amounts of health and strength. There are pink and blue blobs that block his way. There are also skeletons which he can walk past but he has to kill for a quest.

Liam started working on this project last November and created all the graphics himself in the Scratch programme.

Liam said it took him almost five months to get it to the stage it’s at now and he still wants to develop it even further.

“I felt great when I won it. This is the first long-term project and it was a real challenge. I couldn’t believe that I was the junior winner in such a big competition.

“Next, I hope to work on something else. I have just started work on a game based on a comic I used to make when I was at primary school, in Scoil Íde. It’s about a boy who gets superpowers through his game,” he said.

Scratch is a visual programming language that makes is easy to create interactive stories, animations, games, music and art and share these creations on the web. It gives students an understanding of how software is built and how it works.

The annual National Scratch Competition is run by the Irish Computer Society and is sponsored by Lero, the Irish Software Engineering Research Centre. Over 960 projects, involving 3,000 students from 599 schools and coderdojos, participated in the competition this year.

About Colin McGann

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