Game modding with pen and paper

I have lots of good memories from youth camps. Some involve playing Donkey Kong and Mario Brothers while sitting on trees. Another classic video game was Asteroids. When I recently read an article in a German magazine about building an Asteroids clone with an Arduino and an OLED, lots of old memories resurfaced. The source code was provided, and the build was simple. As the control was used as digital, I didn’t use an analog joystick. When I gave it to the kids to play, they didn’t share the same enthusiasm that I had back then. But that’s probably because they grow up with lots more tiny computers than we had. So I wanted to involve them some more, and give them a sense of how this thing works. I don’t know how well they understood, when I explained them the concept of a pixel.
So I grabbed pen and paper, read the source code and drew the pixel art. Next, I told them they could modify the images to their liking, but still preserve the mechanics of the game. It was essentially the spaceship with one frame, the asteroid with three frames and the explosion with four frames. Seven year old Levin understood immediately, and painted his versions. For five year old Noah it might be a bit early, but he also participated enthusiastically.
All I had to do was transform their paintings back into source code and load it onto the AtMega chip. Now they were hooked a lot more to the game than before.