31–40 of 264 posts
I had a blast with Klik'n'Play as a kid. The modern version is called Clickteam Fusion. Revisited it a while ago with my nephew, it has a pretty good tutorial. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clickteam
pico-8
It is a small community of mostly kids aged 15-25 as far as I can tell. It doesn't seem like any professional adult game developers are part of the community (I got an inside view when I took my son to RDC this year).
The top game developers are making millions of dollars per year (they're paid in Robux and converted to USD).
In short, thriving ecosystem with lots of kids having fun doing creative work including creating games, writing code, designing graphics, designing sound effects.
Roblox studio. My son is a sound designer for some of the top games there. He's also learning programming in Lua for Roblox platform. It is a small community of mostly kids aged 15-25 as far as I can tell. It doesn't seem like any professional adult game developers are part of the community (I got an inside view when I took my son to RDC this year). The top game developers are making millions of dollars per year (the…
JavaScript is a very forgiving language to learn:
https://playground.babylonjs.com/
Game level designers are also a fun high-abstraction, and won't overwhelm the impatient.
https://levelsharesquare.com/games/supermarioconstruct
Have fun =3
11 is young but I don't know how difficult could be to use Unity with some help, I know people without any development background who created games there in their spare time.
[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.
My approach with my kids has always been "don't dumb it down". They may not be into programming, but at least they'll be exposed to it.
By giving them the 'easy' version, you are putting up barriers that don't need to be there. Kids are smarter than many adults give them credit for, but again, it depends on the kid.
Roblox studio. My son is a sound designer for some of the top games there. He's also learning programming in Lua for Roblox platform. It is a small community of mostly kids aged 15-25 as far as I can tell. It doesn't seem like any professional adult game developers are part of the community (I got an inside view when I took my son to RDC this year). The top game developers are making millions of dollars per year (the…