DragonRuby https://dragonruby.org/
I had so much fun with this with my 7 year old. Was super easy to take their art and make games with it. You can start by editing one of the many example games it comes with.
Ask HN: Platform for 11 year old to create video games?
131–140 of 264 posts
Re: Ask HN: Platform for 11 year old to create video games?
#132I used to work on the Construct 3 game engine. It’s great for doing small games. You can do a lot by just dropping images in and adding “behaviours” like “platformer movement” and “solid”. Which is enough to build a simple platform game without any coding.
It scales pretty well from that, allowing you to build logic trees in a scratch like environment or go full code with JS.
Trial version is free, and browser based so no install. Loads of examples and demos in the editor to try as well.
Re: Ask HN: Platform for 11 year old to create video games?
#133[random parental advice from the internet] Pick an adult solution and sit with them to provide adult guidance. You are at the stage where your relationship with your child becomes peer to peer. If game programming stays their jam, you will be learning game programming from them in the blink of an eye. It's joyous and wonderful and only gets better. Sure you will miss them being a small child, but you will know an ama…
I have done this, it can work with some kids, still, its too much work. At this age, I think it is more important to keep them motivated and find ways to use their creativity than to get them through the pains of debugging and learning too many technical concepts, even simple details like learning about image formats, how to reference them, case-sensitiveness are just obstacles against meeting their goals.
I feel like we don't give kids enough credit. Game devs who started in the 70s and 80s learned BASIC and all the technicalities of their platforms back then, some eventually moving to Pascal, C, or Assembly. The platforms had fewer variables back then (code running in real mode, your machine was identical to others of the same platform), but kids were still able to learn the minutiae of the Apple II or Commodore 64.
Re: Ask HN: Platform for 11 year old to create video games?
#134Re: Ask HN: Platform for 11 year old to create video games?
#135It'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…
P5 is definitely what I'd recommend to a lot of people for actually starting to learn to code although I think in coding a game it might fall down the second you want to do collisions as you're going to have to roll all that yourself from scratch.
In 2024 I'd be tempted to say if you want to make games it might even be better to just get started with Unity, Unreal or Godot and YouTube tutorials + AI help might be enough to smooth it out enough.
The absolute basic stuff might be trickier than a system where it's quite easy to draw on a screen in a few lines but the stuff of collisions and beyond are way easier.
Re: Ask HN: Platform for 11 year old to create video games?
#136This is a surprisingly crowded space. Aside from the big names like Scratch, Blockly, Roblox and (to an extent) Minecraft Education. There are heaps of projects out there created by educators who wanted to improve their own course. One particular example I was quite impressed with was Blockly -> Unity: https://app.code-it-studio.de/course/step/4/44 I've worked in this space a lot: professional game development, led E…
> It's disheartening for kids when the thing they've worked hard on simply isn't fun — particularly when they share it with friends and are met with, at best, a shrug.
One of the best books I've read on this was "Board Game Design Advice: From the Best in the World" by Gabe Barrett of https://boardgamedesignlab.com/ (which is a great designer resource on its own). There's an audio version as well. What's good about the book is it's advice from pro (some very successful) game designers on how they handle failure and ideas that don't work. Until that point, I felt alone in my failures and discouragement. It really helped to hear it's a struggle for everyone.
Re: Ask HN: Platform for 11 year old to create video games?
#137I started with the World Editor from Warcraft 3 around that age, creating custom maps, gamemodes and spells/abilities. It has scripting capabilities that is somewhere between GUI code and actual code. There's also a lovely community around the World Editor over on https://hiveworkshop.com . Picking the latest custom spell updated as a showcase, if you expand the "Spoiler: Triggers" you can see how the "code" looks li…
Agreed, hook your kid to wc3 and its custom maps first and scripting new maps will come neutrally. At least it happened to me back when I was a kid
Re: Ask HN: Platform for 11 year old to create video games?
#138Been 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 prog…
this is great advice. let them focus on designing gameplay right now. once they've designed a core game loop and they're proud of it, maybe they'll want to learn how to implement it in software, or maybe they'll want to make some sort of physical product (game book, card deck, miniatures, etc.), or maybe they'll want to move on and design a whole new game. tabletop simulator (on steam) is an easy platform for designi…
oh yeah, tabletop simulator
is a great idea. You want to find ways to let them
manipulate existing assets easily and that’s perfect.
Re: Ask HN: Platform for 11 year old to create video games?
#139I would encourage a bunch of different games where making a game is a game mechanic, so this includes: * Little Big Planet * RPG Maker (from the PS1 days ... I don't know what the new ones are like) * Super Mario Maker * Roblox (other comments are saying this is bad? I don't know much, but it was my first thought) * Dreams for the PS4 The person that made Lethal Company was originally a Roblox dev, so I know that rou…
I think Roblox can be bad in a "badly moderated online space" and "potentially abusive monetization/exploitative sharing structure" - the game itself feels good?
Re: Ask HN: Platform for 11 year old to create video games?
#140godot is best: instant feedback, quick to get started with, no glass ceiling, free software to prevent unity-style rugpulls. take a look at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KjX5llYZ5eQ to see what it's like in 6 minutes (from 4 years ago so kind of obsolete) or https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LOhfqjmasi0 to see a complete, high-quality tutorial walking you through building a 2-d platformer
it doesn't use python anymore, although gdscript is very similar to python. but you can get pretty far into building godot games with only a few lines of code