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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?

#201

Post by ripper1138 »

trod123 wrote: post #109

Igor, This is a subject area that seems like it would be a good starter learning project and doable but really its not. There are many problems that just are not suited to a young person at that age level of comprehension. Gaming graphics for example often requires understanding quaternion math, computer science, and hardware at a very low level (realtime processing where ms framerate processing counts). Game design…

If you think Roblox is an unsafe platform, you should see the rest of the internet.

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

#203

Post by nxobject »

I've had fun teaching kids to program for the Playdate, both with their top-down RPG toolkit, and their Lua developer environment as an intermediate level exercise. I find they're really motivated on this platform for a few reasons:

– The fact that they publish their games onto a polished handheld, rather than a toy environment;

– The fact that the Playdate has robust developer environments (incl. simulator)

– The fact that they learn Lua, which they know is a pretty transferrable skill in gamedev;

It also provides a nice environment for kids to start learning graphics techniques and work at the event loop level, if that interests them too.

The downside is that you have to shell out for a Playdate, but at least not the dev environment!

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

#204

Post by softwarebeware »

jhbadger wrote: post #177
Benjamin_Dobell wrote: post #95

This 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…

>Look at all the games that flop on Steam each year. These are made by professionals. 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. Why should this be a concern? Should people not paint for fun if their pictures aren't museum-worthy? Should they not play basketball just because they aren't NBA mater…

of course it's a concern because kids don't know that there's going to be a big gap between what they create and what they envision so it's disheartening for them

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

#205

Post by doctorpangloss »

bentt wrote: post #116

Been 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…

Toddlers make up fun games all the time. Isn't programming the point? Where's Roblox? Is there a single Twine game that an 11 year old has played?

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

#206

Post by [deleted] »

snarf21 wrote: post #148
bentt wrote: post #116

Been 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…

I agree with this other advice. Do "tabletop" first. It doesn't have to be fancy, even just notecards or paper. You can iterate very quickly on the core game loop and "finding the fun". If you do want something fancier than just paper and words, a great option is printing on full page sticker paper and then attach that to chipboard (you can get it cheap online) and then just cut it out. You have a game that feels a l…

[deleted]

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

#207

Post by petee »

daitangio wrote: post #44

Try TIC80 https://github.com/nesbox/TIC-80 Very mice, multi programming language support

TIC80 is great, and I like that it drops some of the arbitrary restrictions that Pico has. And there are some pretty impressive demos including 3d rendering.

Also super easy to deploy your game with builtin emscripten generation

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

#209

Post by skeaker »

trod123 wrote: post #109

Igor, This is a subject area that seems like it would be a good starter learning project and doable but really its not. There are many problems that just are not suited to a young person at that age level of comprehension. Gaming graphics for example often requires understanding quaternion math, computer science, and hardware at a very low level (realtime processing where ms framerate processing counts). Game design…

I suspect the voting is more based on the fact that you're essentially saying "your child should give up, this field is bad and there are no good spaces for kids" when that's both terrible advice and not at all true. Yes, there are exploitative spaces, but there are in fact good spaces too. And your whole thing about how "making games is less fun than playing them and playing them is actually a dark pattern that is evil" is extremely cynical and doesn't hold well if you know about more games than mobile ones or CoD.

If the post was about a kid wanting to write novels and you had said "writing is not as fun as reading, and you shouldn't read anyways because most books are scammy self-help books and conspiracy theories that exploit your brain," I think you would be similarly downvoted. Nothing to do with a Roblox scandal in that case either.

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

#210

Post by sflanker »

I have used Kaboom https://kaboomjs.com/ to help a diverse group of kids build a simple 2d game together. It’s a toolkit specifically geared toward 2d platform we type games but it could be adapted to make other 2d games. I liked that it was just JavaScript under the hood so you can introduce many programming language concepts, but the engine makes it easy to get things going with very little code. There are also lots of opportunity to focus on design aspects over pure code.

You can also use it online with Replit https://replit.com/@replit/Kaboom#code/main.ts which lets you get up and running quickly and share your work online easily.

Apparently it is no longer actively maintained by Replit, but I’m guessing it still works fine and there is also a community fork: https://github.com/kaplayjs/kaplay?tab=readme-ov-file

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