Game maker studio might fit the bill: https://gamemaker.io/en
+1 for GameMaker, though I used it about 20 years ago as a kid. I don't know how well its developed since then.
Ask HN: Platform for 11 year old to create video games?
21–30 of 264 posts
Re: Ask HN: Platform for 11 year old to create video games?
#22[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’d argue against this. If the tool is too difficult, kids often lose interest. So it can have an adverse effect.
As much as I’d want to teach my 11 year old kid Unreal Engine, it’s not realistic. Pun not intended.
Re: Ask HN: Platform for 11 year old to create video games?
#23When I was that age I made a bouncing ball in Flash (ActionScript, similar to JS).[0] This is still my "hello world" when trying out a new game dev environment because it covers: - drawing - movement - input - acceleration - gravity - friction - collision And all of these in essentially the simplest possible way. Most of all, it's a lot of fun to have a bouncing ball, and even more fun if you can use the keyboard or…
I still lament the loss of Flash. It’s ability to get in there and as a single user do everything from design to animation to code front end and back end was enormously flexible and easy for creatively engaging and creating. It fit the “bicycle of the mind” concept.
As far as I know, no single tool has replicated that kind of freedom. For rapid prototypes that one could actually iteratively build on top of top make a full application it was amazing.
I know about the issues and why it isn’t secure etc etc, but in terms of you could interact with it to create we are still at a loss.
Re: Ask HN: Platform for 11 year old to create video games?
#24Have you tried RPG Maker? It’s really fun. I remember using it as a kid. It’s focused on turn based combat.
Re: Ask HN: Platform for 11 year old to create video games?
#25Ive heard good things about gamemaker, as well as RPGmaker. there was one I used to mess around with as a kid I think it was one of those two but cant quite recall. pretty sure it was something maker though. The important thing is to think about the process of making the game. getting the concept together, making a story..
Re: Ask HN: Platform for 11 year old to create video games?
#26The SVG format is easy to learn and you can write your graphics manually inside HTML. I've been using it to make 2D objects in JavaScript that can be positioned, rotated and scaled using the transform style property. You can also animate them with CSS. It's a shame there isn't a similar scriptable format for audio, something like MIDI. Otherwise you can use a canvas, or even a 3D canvas for WebGL.
Re: Ask HN: Platform for 11 year old to create video games?
#27https://gamemaker.io
You will not find better...
Re: Ask HN: Platform for 11 year old to create video games?
#28It'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 loose on it ... It didn't take, I should have spent more time helping them daily on it.
But that's an idea.
Re: Ask HN: Platform for 11 year old to create video games?
#29Phaser with Claude / LLM to help?
Re: Ask HN: Platform for 11 year old to create video games?
#30https://gamemaker.io You will not find better...
and with the ability to create a point and click interface with something specific happening on each click
Also, as you need: GameMaker Language (GML) is GameMaker's scripting language. It is an imperative, dynamically typed language commonly likened to JavaScript and C-like languages