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Ask HN: Best stack for building a tiny game with an 11-year-old?
11–20 of 32 posts
Re: Ask HN: Best stack for building a tiny game with an 11-year-old?
#12Love2d is the best
Re: Ask HN: Best stack for building a tiny game with an 11-year-old?
#13I've been making games with JS in the browser with my kids, ages 7-13. Very simple games, the sort where we can just use emojis instead of real game assets. Even just building a game inside a Claude Artifact is pretty fun.
The nice thing about JS is that there is not very much overhead in setting things up, debugging weird things, restarting.
Re: Ask HN: Best stack for building a tiny game with an 11-year-old?
#14Definitely Game Maker.
Re: Ask HN: Best stack for building a tiny game with an 11-year-old?
#15For an 11year old, Stick with scratch if you ask me.
Take syntax out of the equation and learn basic variables and looping.
Just have fun moving some characters around the screen and have some numbers go up!
Keep it really simple. There could be be a lot of new concepts to learn.
Re: Ask HN: Best stack for building a tiny game with an 11-year-old?
#16Little.js
Small yet covering all basic needs including sound, performant, great examples that you can use as starters (breakout, platformer, puzzle)
Re: Ask HN: Best stack for building a tiny game with an 11-year-old?
#17I would go JS/HTML5 and just do something really basic like memory card game so the programming will be very simple for you and the path to a playable prototype is very short, maybe not even 100 lines of code, nothing to set up, nothing to google. Once it's playable you can focus on polishing how it looks which will probably be more fun.
Would you use a js game engine or just vanilla js?
Re: Ask HN: Best stack for building a tiny game with an 11-year-old?
#18Love2d, or maybe play around with Garry's Mod.
Re: Ask HN: Best stack for building a tiny game with an 11-year-old?
#19If she hasn’t done anything like this before, and you’re hoping she learns something and has something to show in a few hours or over a weekend, I would use Scratch and avoid AI.
Scratch lets the syntax get out of the way, so she can focus on the concepts of what the various puzzle pieces do (loops, conditionals, variables, etc). Feedback is immediate, which makes even simple actions quickly rewarding.
If you want to do some pre-wiring, you can make some stuff in there to get a feel for it and provide some examples.
I made a game in Scratch for my nephews a few years ago. I models it after a web game that made the rounds back when I was in high school that I found fun. They liked it, and the oldest one almost instantly jumped into the code to start tweaking variables to make the game more chaotic. I think he had a little exposure to Scratch at school. He was probably around 11 or 12 at the time.
Re: Ask HN: Best stack for building a tiny game with an 11-year-old?
#20I would go JS/HTML5 and just do something really basic like memory card game so the programming will be very simple for you and the path to a playable prototype is very short, maybe not even 100 lines of code, nothing to set up, nothing to google. Once it's playable you can focus on polishing how it looks which will probably be more fun.
Would you use a js game engine or just vanilla js?
Just vanilla JS unless you've got prior experience because any engine you use is going to have a setup process and bootstrapping code and a learning curve for you that will eat into your time. Across the weekend you might only really have a few hours to dedicate to this project and to hold their attention.
Using the "memory" game as an example, do you want the problems you solve to be how to shuffle the cards in a random order, or do you want to be solving why the cards all positioned weirdly because PhaserJS defines an anchor "origin" point in objects and by default that's x 0.5 / y 0.5 which means 50% width / 50% height aka the center of the object so you need to either set their origin to x 0 / y 0 or factor that into their position by subtracting half their width and height, and their width and height has scaled and unscaled values too width vs displayWidth... and of course if you're using a group for the card's display objects, that class does not support setting the origin.