Squeak/Smalltalk, especially an environment like Scratch:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scratch_(programming_language)
Ask HN: Platform for 11 year old to create video games?
111–120 of 264 posts
Re: Ask HN: Platform for 11 year old to create video games?
#112Squeak/Smalltalk, especially an environment like Scratch: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scratch_(programming_language) * https://scratch.mit.edu * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Squeak
+1 to that
Both my kids did try out Scratch, and would create a lot of funny things with it on rainy days. It is well thought through and easy to learn.
Re: Ask HN: Platform for 11 year old to create video games?
#113Try Pico-8. Lots of source code available on internet archive. Alternatively Tic-80 is also a good platform.
Re: Ask HN: Platform for 11 year old to create video games?
#114It's not a drag and drop environment, but it is JavaScript: https://p5js.org/ Basic 60 frames a second canvas and the rest is JavaScript. Pair that with the excellent Coding Train series https://youtube.com/@thecodingtrain To get around the "serve a webpage locally" problem, you could either have Python or Node serve a webpage, or I once rigged up a samba share and a small web server on a home server and turned a kid…
I’ll second p5.js and the coding train video series. They are quite good, fun and more advanced than than the videos make them out to be.
P5 also has an online dev environment which is good enough. If you create an account you can save stuff online (make sure to backup, another good lesson).
New ones are infrequent but there is a fairly complete set on the web.
Ive also started playing with https://phaser.io/. It’s more of a game framework in JavaScript with built in libraries for collision. The getting started tutorial is decent/short and gives a good idea of what is going on.
Re: Ask HN: Platform for 11 year old to create video games?
#115Gamemaker if you want no code. It's free if you're not planning to release games commercially. You can add code later if you want custom behaviors that gamemaker doesn't include out of the box. 2D only. Godot if you want coding. Coding is required but it uses gdscript which is a python inspired language. The editor is also batteries included, so godot.exe will include everything you need to make a game (aside from as…
GameMaker is generally excellent and decades worth of material, it's original design was to teach students (disclaimer, used to work for YoYoGames a long time ago) not sure where it sits these days, but suspect it's only gotten easier to work with. I just started tinkering with Godot, seems very, very good and the licensing means you won't suddenly have the rug pulled out from under you. I'm torn though, the recommen…
I'll give a +1 to Godot; my son and I had fun going through the 2-D game tutorial and customizing the game. We added some physics, and it was quickly hilarious.
Simpler game systems weren't flexible enough to capture his imagination. We also tried to get started with Unity, but we couldn't get past the first steps.
Re: Ask HN: Platform for 11 year old to create video games?
#116Been a pro gamedev for 20+ years.
You have a born game designer on your hands. It is important to not assume this means they are super interested in programming. They may be, but game design is its own thing. HN will skew you towards programming first, naturally.
Check these out:
- Adventure Game Studio (https://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/)
- Twine (https://twinery.org/)
And these have more visual ways of programming which could let them express their ideas with less friction
- Dreams (Playstation)
- Unity (with Playmaker or Bolt visual scripting)
- Godot
And the other suggestions of Scratch are good, but I find Scratch to feel like a way to learn programming more than expressing game design.
Lastly, explore card and tabletop games with them. It’s a whole thing!
Re: Ask HN: Platform for 11 year old to create video games?
#117Try Pico-8. Lots of source code available on internet archive. Alternatively Tic-80 is also a good platform.
Ain't that for 8-yo
Re: Ask HN: Platform for 11 year old to create video games?
#118you mention your child is making games with powerpoint. a lot of suggestions are for platforms that let your child dip their toes in coding. i'd like to go another direction: consider "tabletop simulator", a virtual board/card game platform.
in TTS, you can import assets easily (as cards or tokens or boards) and move them around in game with no effort. this is enough to play the game, but TTS won't enforce any rules. adding rules enforcement will require coding.
TTS will basically be powerpoint on steroids for your young game designer, allowing quick iteration and more interactive expression options without getting bogged down in encoding the logic of it all. it's less of an engineering gateway and more of a game design gateway.
Re: Ask HN: Platform for 11 year old to create video games?
#119I suggest Unreal Engine, 11 years is old enough to follow tutorials on YouTube. I think I was at around this age when I played with Game Maker on Commodore 64.
There's not much coding required in UE, but there's some learning curve that's for sure. Having an instant feedback however is really good for learning.
I would also suggest https://www.rpgmakerweb.com/ which is a good for 2D RPG games, there are quite a few variants of they they released.
Re: Ask HN: Platform for 11 year old to create video games?
#120My daughter is 11 and has been making simple games on Scratch.
There's a lot of assets (images, characters, backgrounds) already in the system. The sending signals and receiving signals wasn't intuitive for her at first, but now she's getting it pretty well.
I don't think she could/would have figured it out on her own yet. Her older sister is 14 and spent a lot of time learning Scratch last year, so she was able to help her over the hurdles (like signaling). The 14 year old was able to learn it on her own, though I did teach her some concepts like loops and variables at the very start.