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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

#101

Post by veesahni »

rahimnathwani wrote: post #90

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 cou…

We've had a long journey. Main thing is that I realized that my son doesn't learn enough from open ended tools like Scratch. So we tried a bunch of other things.

He started with Scratch JR & Scratch.

Then we switched to Tynker Jr & Tynker. Which provide challenge oriented block based games. Teaches loops, functions, etc.

Then we switched to CodeMonkey, which provides challenge oriented block & code based games (coffeescript, python). Teaches variables, arrays, etc.

Then I felt there was not enough new learning from the above. So I gave him VSCode and had him go through Khan Academy's HTML lesson.

That's when he made a bunch of HTML pages you see: https://www.armaansahni.com/ (pokemon, bakis, etc). ALL the HTML/CSS on the site is hand written.

Then I wanted him to learn how to be resourceful... for this, I gave him a serious of small challenges (eg: "make a function that displays hello world on the screen") where he had to figure out the answer himself. Use Gemini or Google, etc. But don't ask me. He ended up learning how to use Gemini to accelerate his learning (see his blog post, he writes about it a bit) and he was submitting solutions to me in JS. He had prior Gemini experience because he was using it to create images, and JS was natural extension of HTML.

Then one day he decided he wanted to make a game that he had in his mind.

In this above process, I basically observed what he was learning and switched to apps where I felt he could still learn something new.

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

#102

Post by veesahni »

dizhn wrote: post #85
veesahni wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 :)

Haha, good idea :)

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

#103

Post by veesahni »

ethbr1 wrote: post #57
themdonuts wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

both are things that are 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

#104

Post by veesahni »

faizshah wrote: post #58

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…

Kids dad here! Interesting, never heard of processing/p5. Will check it out!

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

#106

Post by veesahni »

blooalien wrote: post #87

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…

Kids dad here.

Actually we did start with Godot - but it was too much too fast and he was overwhelmed.

He mentions this in his blog post. So we ultimately stepped back and I wanted him to learn to be resourceful. I give him a series of small changes (eg: write a function in any language that displays "hello world" on the screen) and he delivered those results in JS (he already knew HTML/CSS at this point). The rest comes as a natural progression.

I guess in this case, the best and pragmatic option was to use what you know.

In the future, we'll try Godot again :)

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

#107

Post by veesahni »

deathanatos wrote: post #55

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 t…

Today, you could paste that into an LLM and it would immediately identify the issue.

The next generation of developers have so much power at their fingertips.

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

#109

Post by drjasonharrison »

Ah, a fun game, with math!

Scrolled through all of the comments, didn't find mention of the spelling mistake right at the top. Sorry, but spelling/grammatical errors often communicate sloppiness. Even when you worked very hard.

"Chosse your oponent"

perhaps:

Choose your opponent:"

and

"you win refresh to go again"

could be

"You won! Refresh to play again" -- you could even add a link to load the page again.

"sorry that was the wrong answer, the corect answer was:"

could have "correct", and a capital letter for "Sorry"

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

#110

Post by veesahni »

danparsonson wrote: post #91

Fantastic! I just beat the Fire Gollum, genuinely happy about that! I love the graphics, and as for suggestions for improvement, it would be cool if you could show the relative power of each move - I imagine the Exploding Star is a stronger attack? Let's see some stats :-)

Yes exploding star is the strongest. Increasing clarity around the attacks (power, charge status, etc) is on his roadmap!

Thanks for checking out the game and for the feedback!

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