I would make a cli game. Something like generating a random number between 1-100 and having the user guess. The game tells you higher, lower, or correct. Then let her try a few times. Then you tell her you can do it in 7 guess every time. Explain the math about alwasy closing the midpoint of the remaining range to cut the field in half. It's like a magic trick based on math that teaches basic syntax.
Ask HN: Best stack for building a tiny game with an 11-year-old?
21–30 of 32 posts
Re: Ask HN: Best stack for building a tiny game with an 11-year-old?
#22I made games with my kids when they were that age. We did it with cardboard, poster board, markers, tape, etc, and built a real-life model/mock-up of the game first. Then we let them play it and only when they actually liked it did we code it. I found that while some kids want to learn to code, most kids don't care about the code and want to make a game. So if you jump straight to code, you actually make them lose in…
Thank you, good advice. I am not yet sure of going the full monty of doing a complete real-life mock-up, but maybe rather focus on a conceptual understanding of how things should wire together. As a bonus I also think that if we create conceptual game assets in the pen and paper way first - say a 60 second drawing of her beloved unicorn - she can use some quiet time later to make it more elaborate.
[random advice from the internet]
Focus on fun and play.
Go where that leads.
Be a peer. Don’t lecture.
Re: Ask HN: Best stack for building a tiny game with an 11-year-old?
#23Playstation Dreams
S&box
Roblox
No?
Re: Ask HN: Best stack for building a tiny game with an 11-year-old?
#24When I was a kid I made a bunch of games myself using Klik n' Play. The modern successor to this is Clickteam Fusion and there is another nocode game engine called Gdevelop that may be similar.
I liked it because it focused on events and had a lot of stuff that was built in like movement I could assign to a sprite etc. After a while I started running up against the limitations of it because it's an event based system and not a programming language. But for that time that was what I really wanted to do, I wanted to make a bunch of small fun games and I was able to do that without worrying about coding, and then I was able to learn that later at my own pace while still having all the fun from the small games I made in the meantime.
It may be different these days because AI can help fill in the gap but that was my experience
Re: Ask HN: Best stack for building a tiny game with an 11-year-old?
#25Just make a simple CLI adventure game:
1. Print "You are in a dark dungeon. There is a door ..." 2. Print "Your options are: 1. Open the door 2. Exit 3. Turn on ..." 3. Read a number as input 4. Goto (yes goto) similar code depending on choice.
Re: Ask HN: Best stack for building a tiny game with an 11-year-old?
#26I'm a big fan of Pico-8. Great community ready to help beginners and pros alike. The feedback loop between its built-in tools is really satisfying, plus its system design forces us to scope our ideas down, though there is surprising depth once you've gotten used to what it can do.
Re: Ask HN: Best stack for building a tiny game with an 11-year-old?
#27Love2D is pretty good, and what I'm using to develop the game I'm working on (Claude works pretty well with it too, I've been assigning it some tasks on Github).
Pico-8 is a bit simpler and is also based on Lua.
There's also the Playdate console. Anyone can make games for it, and it's also based on Lua (and has its own low-code Pulp engine you can make games with also). That would be a fun way to make games and have a console to play them on.
The console isn't cheap though, and it's easy to break (I dropped it on accident from about 2 feet up and its liquid crystal display cracked and leaked and had to be replaced, at almost the full cost of the console again), so they'd have to be careful with it. But it's fun!
Re: Ask HN: Best stack for building a tiny game with an 11-year-old?
#28For the love of god let her learn like a human child without the crutch of AI hallucination machines.
Re: Ask HN: Best stack for building a tiny game with an 11-year-old?
#29There are several engines what doesn't require coding but more like a drag and drop functions. I am not sure if you are familiar with Construct and GameMaker, but you can check them and see if they works best in your case with your daughter.
Re: Ask HN: Best stack for building a tiny game with an 11-year-old?
#30I would make a cli game. Something like generating a random number between 1-100 and having the user guess. The game tells you higher, lower, or correct. Then let her try a few times. Then you tell her you can do it in 7 guess every time. Explain the math about alwasy closing the midpoint of the remaining range to cut the field in half. It's like a magic trick based on math that teaches basic syntax.
I think this is right.
I was going to suggest the same game, guess the number. But instead of doing it in CLI, do it on her class calculator. If she's 11, she may already have something like a TI 82. These come with some form of BASIC (at least it had 30 years ago).
I remember that I did that about 30 years ago, and then because I had done it, I spent hours playing it.
Then if she likes that, you can make a 2 player tic-tac-toe, or a play-against-the-computer paper-rock-scissors. The fun is to start simple and then modify the game slowly. For example, in the guess a number, you could have funny answers for special numbers.
or a tame-the-unicorn game that's a bit like a tamagotchi, you can feed her, play with her, let her sleep, that kind of stuff, with very simple counters. In the end you can to ride on her back and be her best friend forever.
Anything that's turn-based, where you have very simple inputs that go in variables, check the variable against the game state, and then change the state in a basic fashion, and output something as text, and repeat.
Anything with a graphical game loop is going to be too much imo.