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

armaansahni.com

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

#81

Post by veesahni »

ninalanyon wrote: post #47
amelius wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My guess would be quite a lot, since the artwork is not something a child would make despite it looking like its made for children.

We had art lessons in primary school back in prehistoric times when I was that age (sixty years ago). Plenty of us could create more complex artwork than that.

On paper, his art skills are quite underwhelming compared to what I've seen other kids do. So yes, totally agree with you.

Also 32x32 limited reduces complexity a lot when trying to make a visual.

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

#83

Post by Twey »

deathanatos wrote: post #62
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.

> I would like to know when the various weapons are "charged." It doesn't seem like we can tell from looking. I think it might just be doing random choice when it's clicked. I found that if you get the "it's charging" message, you can just click again & again & eventually one of them will go through.

It's not random, you just get +1 charge every time you click an attack — including if the attack doesn't have enough charge to fire.

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

#84

Post by veesahni »

dylan604 wrote: post #53
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

this on his plan for the next version! Appreciate the feedback.

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

#85

Post by dizhn »

veesahni wrote: post #40
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.

improving clarity of the charging aspect is on his roadmap for v2 :) if you use the throwing star multiple times, it charges up other ones. But if you use another one, then you have to charge it up again. I believe 4 throwing stars give you the exploding star!

We need something at the end when we win (or lose). Like a picture of a cat at least :)

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

#86

Post by veesahni »

d--b wrote: post #12

Hey nice job. I think you should add a timer. The faster you answer the question, the greater the hit. It’s a nice challenge code-wise and adds a little stress to the game, as us dads can’t realistically subtract 19 from 56 in less than 4 seconds.

Great idea! Appreciate the feedback.

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

#87

Post by blooalien »

Fantastic work for a 9 year old. If I had access to a computer at 9 I'm not sure I'd be making games so much as playing them. (Although I did move on from playing games to a healthy curiosity about how they worked "under the hood" fairly early on.) When he learns enough to have reached the limits of what he can do in Javascript, you should definitely look into the Godot game engine. Free/OpenSource, powerful, fairly easy to learn, tons of tutorials on YouTube, and even a game that teaches GDScript (their custom Python-like scripting language).

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

#88

Post by kstrauser »

mcbrit wrote: post #69
mcbrit wrote: post #64

Games are a series of interesting decisions. That’s one formulation. Being asked what x+y is with some graphics is not an interesting decision. Perhaps an interesting decision comes later, but I wasn’t interested and bounced.

Assumption: wanted feedback, saying kid was not saying shibboleth.

Context is everything. If I turned that in as a serious project at work, tell me all the ways it was less than perfect. If a 9 year old brings it to show and tell, you explain how much you liked the cool parts.

If my florist handed me a dead flower, I'd be irked. If a 4 year old hands me a dead flower saying "I picked this for you!", I'd tell them what a beautiful flower it was and how much I appreciated the nice thing they did for me.

A 9 year old isn't a 4 year old, but I think you get the gist.

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

#90

Post by rahimnathwani »

This is awesome.

My son recently turned 8. All his coding so far has been with Scratch and other block-based programming environments (Octostudio, VEX Robotics, Apitor, Microsoft Makecode).

His typing speed is better than most kids his age, but still slow (around 10wpm).

I'm curious how you helped introduce your son to text-based programming. I've been considering either:

A) Having him go through this free Python course, that includes inline exercises: https://programming-24.mooc.fi/

OR

B) Having him create a web page in repl.it or similar.

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