Games
These are games I have built in PowerPoint for quarterly team meetings. They are tailored towards the teams. There should be a hard reset in the VB code that you can use to wipe any scores, but this should also happen when starting any game anyway.
Downloads
Games for download. Right-click and ‘Save As’. Expand for more.
| Game | Description | |
 | What’s This, What’s That? | Similar to You Don’t Know Jack’s ‘Dis or Dat’. Players pick a category and are presented with two answers then a lot of answers that fit one of the two parent answers and must decide which one is which. For example, they may pick ‘BritPop’ and have ‘Oasis’ and ‘Blur’ as the parent answers. Then song titles would appear, such as ‘Champagne Supernova’ and you select if this matches either ‘Blur’ or ‘Oasis’. |
 | Find Me | This is a hidden object game over five rounds. Each round has a different specialty, for example, round one give you song lyrics and you must find the album that song is on. More rules are in game. |
 | Dead Men Tell No Tales | This is a hangman style game where you must answer as many puzzles as possible in the time limit. Based on your score you get to uncover parts of the treasure map in the final round to find hidden letters that will help you solve the final hangman puzzle. |
 | 221B Baker Street | The game that started it all. A conversion of the board game of the same name but instead of rolling a dice to move around a board, you just answer trivia questions at the locations to get a clue. Not all locations have clues. If I could do this one again, I’d have dynamic questions. Incidentally, a team playing this googled the answers each time, which then led me to developing more mini-game type games that didn’t have an answer but relied on skill. Cheaters never prosper! |
 | Childhood Memories | Game found in many a quiz show where you are shown an image of a famous person when they were younger. You have to guess as many as you can correctly. |
 | Connect The Wall | Only Connect rip-off, it is the Connecting Wall which has now been popularised in modern culture as ‘Connections’. |
 | Search Words | Similar to the hidden object, this is a hidden word game. You pick a category and are given a bunch of options to pick from and you must select the correct answers. |
 | What’s The Sequency Kenneth | In this game you are shown a sequence of something and then you must answer questions based on that sequence. |
 | Where’s Record | This is another hidden object game, the first one I built that was so popular, I had to make ‘Find Me’. This uses the cover of one of the Guinness Book of World Records and gives you a clue to the record that you must find the correlating picture of. |
Instructions for PowerPoint Games
Please read these very carefully.
You will need to download the game file and save it somewhere, like your desktop. Do not open it once saved to your computer until you have followed the steps below and then the games can begin.
Right-click on the link in the page for the game you want to download.
The first thing you must do is right-click on the downloaded file in the location you saved it and go to ‘Properties’.
On the ‘General’ tab, look at the bottom of the tab for a section called ‘Security’. If you see this checkbox called ‘Unblock’, tick it and then ‘Apply’ / ‘OK’.
You might not see this box – but you should always check this first.
When it comes to game time, open the file on the desktop and you will get a popup for the ‘Security Alert – Macros’.
Click the button that says ‘Enable content for this session’ and then click ‘OK’.
(This image shows the button unchecked)
The game can then be played.
At the end of the game there will be an ‘End Game’ button. This must be pressed once the game is concluded. This saves the presentation (so the screen might look like it has frozen for a second) and closes it automatically. By not pressing this button you will have not saved your score.
This game only needs one person to do the clicking but if you want to share your screen so others can have a turn clicking then they might need to click once to activate their mouse on the presentation and then they should be able to click the buttons.
You will get an introduction as to what you have to do but no further clues.
Be aware that once you click that ‘Start Game’ button, any countdowns will start immediately. You should have plenty of time to play the game.
In testing no bugs were found, but that doesn’t mean there won’t be any! Please remember:
- The animated text sometimes shows some letters not all at first but this quickly resolves itself.
- If the mouse is over one of the buttons before the slide has fully loaded then it might appear that you cannot click the button. It should come back after a jiggle of the mouse and a few seconds but if not, click outside the presentation and then back on it again.
- Similarly, to point two, the “PRESS TO CONTINUE” screen can sometimes take a while to load and the mouse might look like it is frozen in the loading state. Again, if nothing has happened after a few seconds, just click outside of the presentation and then back on it again.
- There is audio, it is only for atmospheric effect. I have set this to be the lowest volume but PowerPoint and sharing does like to boom loudly so please be aware of that.
I think that is everything you need to know.
Many thanks and good luck!
Please note that these games are no longer supported and may not work on your device. Outside of the instructions above, no further support is offered.
Each file should open directly as a show but you are welcome to open the files as a presentation and edit the source code but again, no support is offered and you do so at your own risk.
SQL Projects
Back when I was first building my review website, everything I had was stored in a MySQL database. I used this to teach myself SQL and when I joined a Sunday League football team, I saw an opportunity to develop something special.
One of the difficult things about managing a bunch of grown men is getting them to talk to you. As management there were two things we wanted to know. Are you coming to training and are you available for the match on Sunday? Having built a website using WordPress the team required each member to sign up to the website. New users were given a default role which could be amended by the admin to ‘staff’, ‘player’ or ‘alumni’. I built a dashboard that gave the user the option to select if they were available for training and matchday when they logged in. The managers then had a report that listed all the availability which made planning for training and match days much simpler.
Then I decided to have fun. I love statistics, so every match was entered into a database with dates, teams and a wealth of player stats. This was then used to display on the front page of the website and on a dedicated statistics page so the players could see who had the most goals this season or of all time, along with appearances and playing times. It was a lot of fun to build and the players loved it. I also, personally, believe that the local FA saw this and my website as a whole and then decided to use this as their way of tracking things going forward.
Whilst I do have some code on an old hard-drive, unfortunately I left the club and the website back in 2017. But thanks to the Wayback Machine, we can see something of what it was like.
