Approaching his senior year at Grove City Christian School, Tyler Benedum wanted to challenge himself by pursuing an independent project.
For years, Benedum has had a passion for video games and coding, and now he’s taking the next steps to progress his skills – creating a large-scale video game from the ground up.
Love of the game
Jessica Wohlgamuth-Benedum
His love for video games began in elementary school, when he would spend free time in class playing online games.
That passion prompted an interest in coding, as he discovered more and more on Scratch, a website that uses block coding to create games by allowing users to drag and customize different commands such as “move” and “turn” and other aspects of programming.
“I saw some really fun games that I would always play on (Scratch), and I would be like ‘How (could) I make this?’” says Benedum.
He recalls how he initially reverse-engineered games on Scratch to create his own games. Then, he moved on to creating websites and games through those websites around sixth grade.
Many of Benedum’s early games were simple and focused on the numbers behind them. They involved clicking images for upgrades, inspired by Cookie Clicker.
Over the years, he taught himself coding through YouTube videos, research and studying code of completed projects.
Getting started
Tyler Benedum
Stills from one of Benedum's games
Right before his senior year, Benedum decided to turn his love for coding into an independent study: creating a large-scale video game for high school class credit. Benedum is also hoping creating a large-scale video game will help prepare him for as he plans to pursue a computer science-based degree.
While discussing the project with his guidance counselor, Nancy Gillespie, she encouraged him to start a new project rather than building upon a previous game.
Tyler Benedum
“I’ve always wanted to make my own bigger style game. I’ve made small projects before but with the independent project, I feel like it really motivated me to get something bigger done,” says Benedum.
From there, the project has been completely on his own, with regular check-ins with Gillespie to help keep track of his progress.
He has also documented his progress with videos that he posts on social media accounts.
At the end of the school year, Benedum will present his final project to his principal and guidance counselor to receive credit.
From the code up
Benedum’s game is based on one of his favorites, Lethal Company, which is a scavenger-style game centered around collecting items and returning them to a home base to meet goals.
Elise Fitzpatrick
Benedum has always been an avid reader, which factored into his inspiration for the game. His friends have also played a role in the brainstorming process. One of his friends, Noble Hamilton, suggested a book-related game, while his other friends wanted to see a Lethal Company-style game. Benedum decided to combine the two, creating a game in which a player explores hallways and rooms to collect books. Once he decided on the concept, his first step was to lay out the project by writing his ideas on a piece of paper. He then started using the program Unity, where he codes everything manually, making sure it is imported correctly.
“(The code) I’m using for my independent study, it’s a pretty new language to me. I’ve been learning and teaching myself since I started it,” says Benedum. “It’s all new to me and completely different from anything I’ve done in the past, which will allow me to (do) a lot more.”
Using Unity, he has generated starting rooms and hallways and added textures to help make these rooms and items look more realistic.
In each themed room, there are chances to find books to bring back to the player’s home bases. The books can give the player upgrades such as luck or speed, which help players advance.
Benedum has planned out and named more than 100 different books, using the program Blender to make 3D models of the books and bookshelves.
Although the game doesn’t have a title yet, he hopes to complete it by May.
“I’m proud of the progress I’ve made and how much I’ve gotten to teach myself and learn making a game in an engine like Unity,” says Benedum.
Korrigan Craddock is a contributing writer at CityScene Media Group. Feedback welcome at feedback@cityscenemediagroup.com.
