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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?

#221

Post by andai »

relaxing wrote: post #51
andai wrote: post #12

When 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…

For anyone wanting to do this in JS, check out Dan Shiffman’s Nature of Code https://natureofcode.com/ Uses p5js, so nicer than pure canvas. Note there’s a big leap from making a simple physics toy to making a game .

I actually turned my "ball that can accelerate with keyboard input" into a physics puzzle platformer with minimal additional code (platform collision).

I rebranded the ball to a box and made it so it plays a rocket animation in each (opposite) direction when you press the arrow keys. (In Flash, this was trivial!)

Made it so you had a certain amount of fuel and had to land to refuel.

I remember all of this taking a day or so, but I might be misremembering.

I had it mostly working but then I changed something, broke it, and didn't know how to fix it. (Box kept sinking through the floor)

These days I'd probably just use Box2D hahah

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

#222

Post by BatFastard »

andai wrote: post #50
rkhassen9 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I've dreamed of cloning Flash for a long time. Aiming for full compatibility is infeasible (unless you can convince the Ruffle folks to give it a go once they're done with Ruffle!), but aiming to capture the spirit of Flash (e.g. build Flash like authoring tools on top of TS/WebGL) is certainly doable. The Wick editor was one such attempt, though it didn't gain traction and was abandoned. Also there seem to be quite…

Have you checked out https://haxe.org/ It supports Action script, and is the spiritual successor to Flash

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

#223

Post by andai »

bemmu wrote: post #73
andai wrote: post #12

When 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…

Many bouncing balls are also doable without knowing any actual physics. Balls overlap? Push them away from each other such that the next frame they'd no longer overlap. The result looks surprisingly acceptable. And if you add some blur (I think in Flash this was just a property you can set) based on how fast the ball is moving, it somehow looks more satisfying still.

One of my favorite projects was a bouncing ball sim synced over the network. So you could mess with the balls in one window and it would update in the other too. I never added ball-on-ball action though...

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

#224

Post by NKosmatos »

zestx5 wrote: post #174

[flagged]

I also find it a bit strange that a parent is calling an 11 year old kid “they”, instead of son or daughter, but in the current era we’re living we have to take into account the different pronouns and how someone identifies.

https://pronouns.org/how

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

#229

Post by doctorpangloss »

bentt wrote: post #220
doctorpangloss wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

The tools in Roblox are not that simple and are pretty geared towards technical people. They're cool! But in this case I think there are better ways to start.

Isn’t that the idea though? To do something technical? I don’t know, maybe thousands of gifted kids are thriving at making fun things in Roblox Studio. They get through the grind because it’s where the friends are. Whereas a kid getting excited about Twine? Seems really lame, which is guaranteed to make a gifted kid only performatively interested.

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

#230

Post by zoomablemind »

stuporglue wrote: post #120

My daughter is 11 and has been making simple games on Scratch. There's a lot of assets (images, characters, backgrounds) already in the system. The sending signals and receiving signals wasn't intuitive for her at first, but now she's getting it pretty well. I don't think she could/would have figured it out on her own yet. Her older sister is 14 and spent a lot of time learning Scratch last year, so she was able to h…

+1. Scratch indeed is very flexible environment for that (even younger) age group.

Lots of interactive ideas could be easily implemented with already available assets (sprites, backgrounds, sounds), customized too. It's more tooled for platformers. There are many nice tutorials (loadable projects). Tons of books (we used 'Super skills. How to code').

The other day this 8yo even had to face first ever concurrency bug - the race condition. Alas there are no ready mutexes as such in Scratch, but we found a way to synchronize the execution.

At times I did feel that it'd be faster to just type the code, but the kid actually felt more in control doing all the needed coding with touch/mouse.

Also the projects/games are shareable, so friends can load that too.

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