Scratch. It's the perfect programming language for kids that age and especially makes programming games easy and natural. I've taught about a hundred kids that age programming over the years through scratch. The ones who get inclined eventually move to python.
Ask HN: 9-yo son wants to build a game, I'm lost. What can I do?
321–330 of 391 posts
Re: Ask HN: 9-yo son wants to build a game, I'm lost. What can I do?
#322It falls short on your 3d request, but for someone new to things I'd go down the pico-8 rabbit hole. There are some really spectacular (given the limitations) 3d games, but they're the exception. However, the IDE is built-in, it's basically lua, and you can load/view/edit the source code for all the published games. https://www.lexaloffle.com/pico-8.php Some newcomer-friendly tutorials: https://nerdyteachers.com/PICO…
My 9 and 12 year old have both played a fair bit with Pico-8, and while the music and sprite tools are neat, I think there's a lot that it leaves on the table. The Lua environment is a fun puzzle for seasoned developers to reason about how to make the most of it, but for a novice, stuff like physics, collision detection, and an entity system out of the box is more like the right starting point. You need a lot of boil…
This is a great callout.
I think for a newcomer this is where loading an existing game (like Celeste...) and just changing sprites or updating logic gets you some of the non-built in features for free - but at that point you're more modding someone else's game more than creating your own. I can see how that path could be a non-starter for some folks (no matter their age).
Re: Ask HN: 9-yo son wants to build a game, I'm lost. What can I do?
#323I am a professional game developer and have been in the industry for 25 years. I am a few years ahead of you with a 14 year old son whose interest in computers and gamedev I've been cultivating since he was around 4. What I find interesting about your post is that your son is designing on paper. He may be a Game Designer at heart and not a technologist, so you'll have to tease that out. The difference would be whethe…
Solid advice! I think at this age kids just naturally want to have their footprint in the digital world. Games is just an obvious space. On the same subject, when my 5yo came up with a very detailed comic story, all hand drawn in a span of two days, we just scanned the drawings and put them in a video sequence. Sure, the grand vision was some real action, but seeing his work digitized and animated has served it's ins…
Yeah that's great that you were able to translate what your kid did to a video. I bet he was stoked!
A friend of ours helped his daughter get set up to do do Lego time lapses with an iPhone. Also a fun way to make something.
Pretty soon there will be AI tools where a kid can just type in a few things and get a game out of it. (There probably already is.) That'll be fun for them for a bit at least.
Re: Ask HN: 9-yo son wants to build a game, I'm lost. What can I do?
#324With my son we hooked a python API to minecraft, you can then write some kind of bot. He really had fun with it. Being able to see things in a 3d world he knows with 2 lines of code is what got him hooked. He learned python to build things, not to learn to code. I think you should use a platform with immediate results like this and forget about coding. There is also dreams on ps5 which is great. Try to find a way to…
this is only for the raspberry pi version of minecraft, right?
Re: Ask HN: 9-yo son wants to build a game, I'm lost. What can I do?
#325Why not try to build the game together in a sandbox game like Minecraft, Gary's Mod, Little Big Planet, Mario Maker, etc. The limitations of those sandbox engines make it more fun, there's no (or minimal, simplified logic) programming required, and you can instantly see results and have fun.
I'd also say this. The technical aspect of a game compared to the actual game design is a very different sort of problem. Specifically with Minecraft you could design a game using mods like Create.
For inspiration I would point to the creator TangoTek. Over the past year he designed a deck building dungeon crawler in vanilla-ish Minecraft using redstone. It's a great series to see how you can design a game in almost any environment.
Re: Ask HN: 9-yo son wants to build a game, I'm lost. What can I do?
#326I'm seeing a lot of parenting advice here that is probably true, but has the potential for a catastrophic downside.
It is likely that a 9 year old isn't interested in the work that goes into game dev, yes, but it is possible that any given 9 year old has a much richer understanding of the world than one might give them credit for.
If your son is one of those, one of the worst things you could do is to coddle them and avoid the hard work of learning. Kids who are indicating that they're ready to expand their universe are in a fragile state of motivation, and it's easy to kill that by deciding for them "what they are capable of".
Of course, you don't wanna push the issue if they're not in that place (which is also fine). Maybe _try_ treating them as a co-creator, with all the attendant admissions of what is and isn't known ("I'm not sure how we could do that, buddy, but here's where we can start looking"), and if they don't respond with the appropriate level of motivation and energy, then default to making something in roblox or whatever.
To answer your specific questions:
- unity is really not a bad starting point, it's very batteries included
- rather than keeping the project contained, build your way up to the vision with smaller "practice" projects
- start subscribing to premium GPT. For total beginners to code there really is no better tool (I know I'm gonna catch flak for this, but having a tight feedback loop with some working code is preferable to doing everything the "right" way when you're self-teaching)
Re: Ask HN: 9-yo son wants to build a game, I'm lost. What can I do?
#327Mario Maker. Pretty much full stop. After that, Scratch has some good facilities to make games, as well. But starting at low level dev kits is just not where you want to be.
RPG Maker as well, my daughter had fun with that at a young age.
I saw another post mentioned more games like Minecraft. There are a surprising number of options nowadays. I just got the kids Super Dungeon Designer and I think they are enjoying it. They also liked Sound Shapes.
Big point is essentially do not burden the kids with general coding, asset creation, or other software development style things. They want to make fun things and play with them, move to a content creation paradigm.
Re: Ask HN: 9-yo son wants to build a game, I'm lost. What can I do?
#328Depends on how complex your game tries to be, I honestly would try some JavaScript in the browser just because it is so easily accessible and almost immediately nets results. Three.js for rendering and the logic you would need to implement yourself.
I only dabbled in game development and have no experience with engines like Unity. I do 3d modelling thoughg and know a bit about asset pipelines. There is quite a lot to learn, even with supposed ready engines like unity.
There are some example games, here is something made for Google:
https://beinternetawesome.withgoogle.com/en_us/interland
I am sure there are tutorials for similar games.
Re: Ask HN: 9-yo son wants to build a game, I'm lost. What can I do?
#329GDevelop. My son has used that happily. Meant for no-code development, so no real programming experience there, but good to get something out quick. Nowadays supports 3D also, but that is recent feature and will definitely evolve for some time.
Came here to recommend GDevelop too. I taught my 10 year old GDevelop and she preferred it to p5js (Javascript programming) and it's a lot more powerful than Scratch coding. (but is visual too, like Scratch)
Also, lots of good tutorials on YouTube and a friendly community.
Re: Ask HN: 9-yo son wants to build a game, I'm lost. What can I do?
#330Game modding, especially Minecraft, would spark his curiosity and it would feel so rewarding to see something he created in a game he knows.
Even something like changing a texture is already magical when you never experienced programming.