Ask HN: 9-yo son wants to build a game, I'm lost. What can I do?

Background :

My son hasn’t really showed any interest in computers until now. He’s been spending a lot of time over the last couple of weeks designing some sort of a game (on paper) and now he wants me to help him build it, whatever it is. I don’t want to let him down but I also know how much work that goes into a game (he specifically wants it to be 3D).

I’m a decent developer, although I’ve not done game development professionally I did tons of demos on the 90’s so I feel I know the basics of 3D math but I’m pretty sure he will lose interest if I try to teach him x86 assembler :)

Joke aside, what can I do? This sounds like a great project for us to explore together and hopefully he can grow interest in software design and development.

Are there development kits I can start with (unity?)

How do I keep the project “contained” so he feels that he accomplished something but still feels we developed something close to his vision?

Thank you HN.

It sounds like the Replit ecosystem would be a good fit.

Let him?!

Like don't make this too complicated. My dad, when I wanted to learn programming literally just gave me some "starter BASIC program" and let me find out things from there. No internet, nothing. Oh and a set of like a gazillion 3.5" floppies with Borland C and a book accompanying it.

I made a super cool looking password entry screen with ascii art that was started by autoexec.bat before showing the start menu. Super secure lol (i.e. not at all but super cool and fooled all the other kids).

I'd recommend Roblox for him to start if he really wants to make a game. Zero math required unless he wants to do those parts. Lots of help online, in some cases probably from kids his age actually. And you can but don't have to program things properly instead of just using the UI.

Also, you didn't mention what his vision is. So we can't really say if 'let him loose' is likely just gonna frustrate him or what.

That said, one of the best learning experiences I had was when I broke the computer completely. I was playing around with those autoexec.bat settings and suddenly I could not get it to start at all anymore. My parents were gone for the evening. I had I think like 3 or 4 hours until they'd come back and I definitely didn't want to tell my dad that "I broke the computer". I tinkered and tried things for hours and like minutes before they came back I got it to boot into a DOS prompt again. I was so proud. My dad never knew. R.I.P.

I third Scratch.

It won't be 3D, but the reality of life is that sometimes you have to move incrementally--and that's a big part of programming :T

Just download the Godot engine[0] it's free and there are lots of tutorials on Youtube. The documentation[1] also has a tutorial that shows you how to create a small 2D and 3D game. To learn programming with gdscript there is this free course by gdquest.[2]

[0] https://godotengine.org/showcase/

[1] https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/getting_started/intro...

[2] https://gdquest.github.io/learn-gdscript/