81–90 of 264 posts
Game maker studio might fit the bill: https://gamemaker.io/en
Roblox Creator studio, its amazing, tons of tutorials and its super easy to publish something
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I'm not a huge fan of scratch (for obvious reasons I'm not the target audience!), but my 10 year old can't get enough of it. Recently we started digging into some of the more "advanced" concepts (basically arrays and functions) and I was surprised how far you could actually get with the system. I'm trying to move him off scratch on to something text based, but imo for a kid it's hard to go wrong starting with Scratch…
The social angle of sharing ones games with friends and getting likes etc. and the ability to quickly play it off a link are huge factors that keep motivation high for kids. This is underappreciated. I've been teaching my son JS but his main gripe is that he doesn't have an easy way to share his stuff in a quickly playable format.
Also, out of curiosity, have you been teaching him JS or TS? I feel like it is a sin to not use TS these days, but not sure if it makes it easier or harder for a new young programmer to learn.
Gamemaker if you want no code. It's free if you're not planning to release games commercially. You can add code later if you want custom behaviors that gamemaker doesn't include out of the box. 2D only. Godot if you want coding. Coding is required but it uses gdscript which is a python inspired language. The editor is also batteries included, so godot.exe will include everything you need to make a game (aside from as…
I just started tinkering with Godot, seems very, very good and the licensing means you won't suddenly have the rug pulled out from under you.
I'm torn though, the recommendation for things like Roblox seem valid, but indeed it seems like the kind of thing where you will hit a glass ceiling. On the flip side getting started on something more generic may be tedious and cause an 11 year old to lose interest quickly.
I think it comes down to the motivations and nature of the individual - do they wanna learn the skill, or do they want to create something quick that they can show off to their friends? (and maybe go further if they really enjoy it)
Gamemaker if you want no code. It's free if you're not planning to release games commercially. You can add code later if you want custom behaviors that gamemaker doesn't include out of the box. 2D only. Godot if you want coding. Coding is required but it uses gdscript which is a python inspired language. The editor is also batteries included, so godot.exe will include everything you need to make a game (aside from as…
It's not a drag and drop environment, but it is JavaScript: https://p5js.org/ Basic 60 frames a second canvas and the rest is JavaScript. Pair that with the excellent Coding Train series https://youtube.com/@thecodingtrain To get around the "serve a webpage locally" problem, you could either have Python or Node serve a webpage, or I once rigged up a samba share and a small web server on a home server and turned a kid…
This does pretty much what you have described. It supports scenes, image maps for point and click, dialogues and is low code.
Enu is a 3d live coding playground where you can control objects with code. Similar to LOGO but in 3d. It uses Nim - language very similar to Python and easy to pick up.
Duscussed previously on HN:
17 comments - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36966116
6 comments - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38520901
Nim forum post with announcement of Enu 0.2 and some useful links: https://forum.nim-lang.org/t/10700
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The social angle of sharing ones games with friends and getting likes etc. and the ability to quickly play it off a link are huge factors that keep motivation high for kids. This is underappreciated. I've been teaching my son JS but his main gripe is that he doesn't have an easy way to share his stuff in a quickly playable format.
Time to teach him nextjs and get him deploying to vercel!! (Or at least set up a template for him!) Also, out of curiosity, have you been teaching him JS or TS? I feel like it is a sin to not use TS these days, but not sure if it makes it easier or harder for a new young programmer to learn.
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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…
I have looked at the Wick Editors source code and managed a sucessful build with some minor changes and felt picking it up is doable, but not easy. But a satisfying way to develope for me, would require a rewrite of many parts. Or most parts, except the UI ..
Pixi as the graphical base would be the way, I think.
But I could not do it as a side project as of now, maybe one bright other day.