My suggestion, as a game developer for nearly 30 years: pico-8. If you have any questions. Ping me on Twitter. It's the weekend after all ;)
Ask HN: Platform for 11 year old to create video games?
91–100 of 264 posts
Re: Ask HN: Platform for 11 year old to create video games?
#92My kiddo want to make game on Nintendo Switch, which is almost impossible at this time, but I recently found Fuze 4 ( https://www.nintendo.com/us/store/products/fuze4-nintendo-sw... ) that allows him to do exactly that. Quite happy with Fuze's workflow. We can even connect an external keyboard so he can type on it.
SmileBASIC is another coding environment on Switch. The DSi and 3DS versions were quite popular, I'm surprised the Switch version didn't catch on as much as they did
Re: Ask HN: Platform for 11 year old to create video games?
#93100% GameMaker https://gamemaker.io/en
Re: Ask HN: Platform for 11 year old to create video games?
#94I would encourage a bunch of different games where making a game is a game mechanic, so this includes: * Little Big Planet * RPG Maker (from the PS1 days ... I don't know what the new ones are like) * Super Mario Maker * Roblox (other comments are saying this is bad? I don't know much, but it was my first thought) * Dreams for the PS4 The person that made Lethal Company was originally a Roblox dev, so I know that rou…
All versions of RPG Maker frequently go on sale on Steam, the older ones you can get for pennies. XP, VX and VX Ace support Ruby as a scripting language, meanwhile MV and MZ supports web export and JS scripting. Can't recommend these programs enough.
Re: Ask HN: Platform for 11 year old to create video games?
#95This is a surprisingly crowded space. Aside from the big names like Scratch, Blockly, Roblox and (to an extent) Minecraft Education. There are heaps of projects out there created by educators who wanted to improve their own course. One particular example I was quite impressed with was Blockly -> Unity:
https://app.code-it-studio.de/course/step/4/44
I've worked in this space a lot: professional game development, led EdTech engineering departments, and worked as CTO of a company building a UGC interactive fiction platform. I've a six year old daughter who is really interested in creating — art, media, games, whatever. My personal opinion is that a lot of these platforms make a critical mistake. They all neglect that game design is hard!
Look at all the games that flop on Steam each year. These are made by professionals. It's disheartening for kids when the thing they've worked hard on simply isn't fun — particularly when they share it with friends and are met with, at best, a shrug.
Kids are going to be different, so it's still worth trying all the stuff that's already out there. However, I'm currently working on something in this space that's a bit different. Basically, removing the complexity of game design from the equation, but still allowing creativity, the ability to program functionality, build new mechanics and the ability for kids to share their work.
Of course, it's an interesting one, because kids most certainly say they "want to build games". It's just that kids, young kids in particular, don't understand what is actually involved in building the games that they love to play. The goal of what I'm building is very much to guide kids to graduate beyond the platform and ideally set kids up to make games from scratch — it's just not a good place to start.
Re: Ask HN: Platform for 11 year old to create video games?
#96100% GameMaker https://gamemaker.io/en
I can't speak for the current version of GameMaker, but the versions from around 2002 ("by Mark Overmars", when I was 9 or 10) were definitely a significant part of my development as a programmer, so I'm happy to see this recommended.
Re: Ask HN: Platform for 11 year old to create video games?
#97If you don't mind doing choose your own adventure style stories, I'd recommend Twine. It's a low-to-no code way to write branching stories, and you can add variables and conditional branching if you want to add a little bit of code. It creates a playable website of your story when it compiles. I do a lot of heavy coding but I still play around with Twine sometimes because it's fun. I also sometimes prototype the bran…
That's awesome. Thanks!
Re: Ask HN: Platform for 11 year old to create video games?
#98Roblox 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…
Required reading before throwing your child into the machine that is Roblox: https://www.theguardian.com/games/2022/jan/09/the-trouble-wi...
tldr; teenagers on the internet. Nothing here described at Roblox doesn't happen to teenagers on the internet as a whole; Discord, IM. At least the people learned a valuable skill in Roblox.
Re: Ask HN: Platform for 11 year old to create video games?
#99Do you have a Nintendo Switch?
I bought:
https://www.nintendo.com/us/store/products/game-builder-gara...
and gave it to a co-worker's kid who enjoyed it quite a bit and said:
>This is the greatest game ever!
Re: Ask HN: Platform for 11 year old to create video games?
#100I started with the World Editor from Warcraft 3 around that age, creating custom maps, gamemodes and spells/abilities. It has scripting capabilities that is somewhere between GUI code and actual code. There's also a lovely community around the World Editor over on https://hiveworkshop.com . Picking the latest custom spell updated as a showcase, if you expand the "Spoiler: Triggers" you can see how the "code" looks li…
I came here to recommend Warcraft 3 also. It's how my son started on the path to coding. Being able to add to an existing platform gave his early efforts some polish that encouraged him to continue.