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Ask HN: Platform for 11 year old to create video games?

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Re: Ask HN: Platform for 11 year old to create video games?

#151

Post by [deleted] »

a-saleh wrote: post #139
t-writescode wrote: post #66

I 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?

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: Platform for 11 year old to create video games?

#153

Post by wormlord »

shortercode wrote: post #132

I 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…

Construct 3 is great. I used to it to teach at a camp. I would recommend this over everything else in this thread. It has a low barrier to entry, with the option to learn JS a bit at a time as the kid's skills grow.

Re: Ask HN: Platform for 11 year old to create video games?

#155

Post by ActionHank »

My son is in the same age group. These are some notes for what worked well for him.

Godot and Gamermaker are great because they have loads of tutorials on YT. He can sit down and work through those pretty comfortably. These work better than Unity \ Unreal because those have so much to learn and a long time before you have something playable and many tutorials would switch out to an IDE and had loads of files which overwhelmed him.

He started with Scratch and built up to some pretty complex gameplay. What's nice with this is that he was able to remix existing games he liked that others have published. This meant he learned more as he modified. Checkout griffpatch on YT for the more complex stuff.

Re: Ask HN: Platform for 11 year old to create video games?

#157

Post by lazycog512 »

a-saleh wrote: post #139
t-writescode wrote: post #66

I 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?

this.

the tradeoff is with something like godot you only have examples/tutorials and hardly ever something "finished" or "very fun" or "thing people are playing".

something like roblox or another modding-focused game allows you to see what other people did as inspiration or to show what other people are actually interested in, as opposed to just making things for yourself.

Re: Ask HN: Platform for 11 year old to create video games?

#160

Post by Cthulhu_ »

gcr wrote: post #145

Here’s an unconventional choice: grab a copy of the old RPG Maker XP and let them at it. Most of the difficulty is selecting and arranging art assets. There are scripts, but the language syntax is all controlled by button presses and dialog boxes, so it’s difficult to screw up. If your kiddo is more programming-inclined, PICO-8 is self contained.

Self-contained and constrained on purpose; if you go with e.g. Unreal or some other big engine, there's a real risk of making something too big, whereas pico-8 limits you in how big a game can be.
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