I am also going to highly recommend Scratch[1]. That is what got me into a programming around that age. You can even help him make a website to host his games on.
Ask HN: 9-yo son wants to build a game, I'm lost. What can I do?
351–360 of 391 posts
Re: Ask HN: 9-yo son wants to build a game, I'm lost. What can I do?
#352Consider using some seriously modern tech (LLMs!) to make games with point and click/draw.
https://github.com/tldraw/make-real
This is a really fun project that uses GPT4 and TLDraw. People have made games with it- it’s super WYSIWYG and you can draw the state machines as a diagram with boxes and arrows, the UI directly, etc. I would have loved to have this as a kid.
Re: Ask HN: 9-yo son wants to build a game, I'm lost. What can I do?
#353Off to a good start if he has planned some of the game on paper. I would try and get him to do the following:
1. Take his notes and make a basic game design doc. If its 3d, focus more on what the main character can do than anything else.
2. From the design doc, see if theres any free or free adjacent unity plugins to do what he wants.
2a. If he tries out a feature and he doesnt like it, send him back to the design doc, seeing as thats what he sees his role as.
3. Make yourself more of a systems integrator. You will probably need to learn some stuff, like blender scene importing, and basic game logic. But its pretty easy these days to knock something at least fun to demo together from the unity store.
Re: Ask HN: 9-yo son wants to build a game, I'm lost. What can I do?
#354Earlier quoted context omitted.
Strong +1 for PICO-8. My nine year old kid got right into it.
This and TIC-80 recommended bellow really feel more like a fun challenge for a programmer than a creative tool for a kid. Was it the first time your kid was exposed to any kind of programming?
True, was not the first exposure, and I still did a good lot of hand holding at the beginning.
Re: Ask HN: 9-yo son wants to build a game, I'm lost. What can I do?
#355I've used and had fun with Game Maker at his age - not sure how it fares with 3D though, there might be better alternatives nowadays :)
Re: Ask HN: 9-yo son wants to build a game, I'm lost. What can I do?
#356No idea what it is like to program/develop on, but Roblox sounds like a good introduction - simple 3D games, good platform, basic graphics.
Re: Ask HN: 9-yo son wants to build a game, I'm lost. What can I do?
#357[dead]
Re: Ask HN: 9-yo son wants to build a game, I'm lost. What can I do?
#358Godot is free and does 2d and 3d.
I am not a game dev but there are a heap of YouTube/web based tutorials, free models and everything out there for you to get started with!!!!!
Good luck and enjoy the time with your kid
Re: Ask HN: 9-yo son wants to build a game, I'm lost. What can I do?
#359Understand that you're not going to finish what you start. Do things that are fun. Keep a notebook of ideas. Talk about plans and what you want do. Spend time with him. Even if almost none if it ever makes it into code, the imagination part will be going wild. Look at what he's really doing. He doesn't want to CODE. He wants to make a game. Like every kid. Emphasize the creative part just like he wants. Do things on…
I wanted to learn coding at 8 to make games, not necessarily with my father. It was begin 80s so bit different; I went to halls were they sold inventory from burnt out stores where I got books and mags for pennies and so I learned basic (and basicode), asm and pascal. After that my parents brought me to meet-ups. I wanted to spend time with wizards who could teach me software/hardware, not my parents per-se (although my father did work at a IT firm, programming was not what he did).
Re: Ask HN: 9-yo son wants to build a game, I'm lost. What can I do?
#360Godot [1] is a very nice game engine. There's a game on Itch.io that teaches the scripting language it uses [2], and a ton of great tutorials on YouTube for beginners and experts alike. [1]: https://godotengine.org/ [2]: https://gdquest.itch.io/learn-godot-gdscript
I played around a bit with Godot with one of my kids around that age some years ago and I think it was good. We actually started with Scratch, but that quickly got annoying for both of us, with all the dragging around of boxes on the screen to write scripts instead of just typing in a few lines of text. We used the intro tutorials from https://kidscancode.org/ . Looks like those have not been updated to Godot 4 thoug…
Godot 3 has more "goodies" available (for now) around the web and in the Asset Library, but that's changing quickly. Godot 4 has some more modern features and other improvements which (depending on your project intent) may make it the better choice. It honestly depends entirely on what you're attempting to create, but at this particular point in time either one will likely get the job done. Sooner or later Godot 4 though will be the preferred version to choose, so it can't really hurt to start learning it now. :)