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My son (9 yrs old) used plain JavaScript to make a game, and wants your feedback

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Re: My son (9 yrs old) used plain JavaScript to make a game, and wants your feedback

#51

Post by veesahni »

sureglymop wrote: post #33

Okay... but.. A blog and a newsletter form? What could your 9 year old probably want to message me about? That's honestly a bit much.

We originally posted a link to the game on on reddit in r/programming, but they removed the post because it was an "app demo" and suggested a blog post instead. That got him motivated to write about the game (And I leveraged that motivation to help him learn how to communicate better - structure of a blog posts, etc)

Newsletter was added after people on reddit asked about how they can be notified for v2 of the game :) - I had to help him with the newsletter integration.

Re: My son (9 yrs old) used plain JavaScript to make a game, and wants your feedback

#53

Post by dylan604 »

Frummy wrote: post #27

Could have a virtual numpad

yeah, I think an improvement would be not using alert(). writing the question to a DOM element and then getting the response from an input field would be much more valuable experience for real world applications as web trends have moved away from the heavy use of alerts

Re: My son (9 yrs old) used plain JavaScript to make a game, and wants your feedback

#54

Post by codethief »

Very impressive! Hopefully you'll excuse this question but do you foresee AI in the future also taking over the handholding & guidance that you as parents provided to your son? (In other words: Will kids soon learn exclusively from AI?)

Re: My son (9 yrs old) used plain JavaScript to make a game, and wants your feedback

#55

Post by deathanatos »

One of the best games I played as a kid was this top-down RPG; the graphics were 2D tiles, pretty clearly drawn with MS Paint or something close. UI was just Visual Basic 6. Indie dev. Fun game. This reminds me of it.

One of the neat things about these sorts of indie games is you can often watch the skills of the dev improve over the life of the game, too. The first blood spatters in the game above were little more than #f00 scribbles in MS Paint. Later graphics got significantly better.

It also had a generic name ("RPGWo", short for "RPG World") — "THE GAMEY GAME" feels right up there.

One of the hardest bugs I ran into as a kid was some code that was something like,

  List lst = new List();
… but when I transcribed that onto a computer (this was in a book) I accidentally wrote,

  List 1st = new List();
… because typography is hard, and the font the book used had a l/1 confusable. Compiler error, one of my first. Took me forever to figure it out. (No access to the Internet, then.)

After gaining access to the Internet, finding an online forum was the best, since then you could share a bug with other people! And they'd tell you where you went wrong! (Thank you, Allegro forums.)

Re: My son (9 yrs old) used plain JavaScript to make a game, and wants your feedback

#56

Post by WesleyJohnson »

This is pretty impressive! I didn't expect math, so that was a nice surprise. Many others have pointed out some nice changes. I have a super nitpick - the enemy's HP immediately decrements before the "hit" animation plays out. There is properly delay before the Game Over screen, so that tells me the HP decrement could probably get the same treatment easily enough.

Kudos to your son and props for fostering this creativity in them!

Re: My son (9 yrs old) used plain JavaScript to make a game, and wants your feedback

#57

Post by ethbr1 »

themdonuts wrote: post #7
DidYaWipe wrote: post #6

Love it. In terms of constructive feedback: I would like to know when the various weapons are "charged." It doesn't seem like we can tell from looking. Also it might be interesting to see what question the opponent is working on and what his answer is.

Yeah, I was having the same issue. I couldn't tell why the weapon was not charged up. But sometimes on the second click it would work. But well done!

I think there are two improvement requests here:

1. Dont't allow button clicking when not the player's turn (expect tiny dev might be getting tripped up by async event handlers here)

2. Visually flag whether or not an ability is charged

Re: My son (9 yrs old) used plain JavaScript to make a game, and wants your feedback

#58

Post by faizshah »

I love this, I first learned Java and “Kids Programming Language” (a strange action script-y flash inspired thing) in elementary school and the lessons I learned there stuck with me until today.

I would highly recommend parents consider teaching their kids using processing (p5.js), it’s super visual but still “real” code so you still build that muscle memory of thinking in loops and typing out real code: https://p5js.org/tutorials/

There’s lots of art and games to be inspired by: https://openprocessing.org/browse?time=anytime&type=tags&q=g...

And there’s some great books from dan shiffman on it that are super visual but still teach programming concepts: http://learningprocessing.com/ https://natureofcode.com/

When you start out programming that young it is hard to go from idea to thing on the screen doing what you want. So the advantage of using processing is it keeps kids engaged and removes the frustration of not making progress since everything is visual you’re always moving around stuff on the screen every frame so it’s quick and easy feedback.

Re: My son (9 yrs old) used plain JavaScript to make a game, and wants your feedback

#59

Post by veesahni »

jablongo wrote: post #23

I cant tell what my charge level is. This is crazy though, congrats... Look at the blog to see how he did it mostly using ai. It looks like the dad set it up like a series of challenges to get the kid familiar w using ai then he was able to make a game. Nice work!

Kid's dad here. My goal was only to "teach him to code" .. the motivation to build a game was all his. He mixed something something he loves (fantasy worlds) with something that's useful (learning to code), so I think that helped with the motivation to keep going.
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