Amazing, a game a product finished that also mix turn-based fight and questions! Great son and great parenting. Congrats!!!
thanks for checking out the game!
My son (9 yrs old) used plain JavaScript to make a game, and wants your feedback
151–160 of 493 posts
Re: My son (9 yrs old) used plain JavaScript to make a game, and wants your feedback
#152Had my 9 year old play it and he enjoyed it, though he did say that he didn't get why weapons were charging and when he could use them. Instructions or some indicator of availability would improve it, but overall it's good!
fixing the charge-confusion is on the plan.
Thanks for checking it out!
Re: My son (9 yrs old) used plain JavaScript to make a game, and wants your feedback
#153Awesome Job! The animations on the characters are really great and do a lot to make the game feel more alive.
Here's some ideas for improvements you could make:
- Add a button to go back to the main menu / exit the battle, I keep hitting the home button instead
- Add some sort of indicator to make it clear when an attack is charged. Also maybe some hints as to how attacks are charged in the first place.
- Consider moving the question input to inside the game instead of the alert
- Try playing around with the colors to make text easier to read.
Re: My son (9 yrs old) used plain JavaScript to make a game, and wants your feedback
#154Earlier quoted context omitted.
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!
Are you giving him the full experience? :D
"Sorry, you have to branch first."
"Sorry, you have to submit a pull request."
"Did you complete your peer code review?"
"Did you close the associated Jira tickets?"
"Did this pass your test harness?"
"Are you having this built and tested by your CICD bot?"
"... is this project's architecture even approved? Sorry, you need to submit this to the architectural review board. They meet once a month."
Come to think of it, I'm now recognizing why coding used to be more fun.
Re: My son (9 yrs old) used plain JavaScript to make a game, and wants your feedback
#155Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm curious how much use he got out of Tynker? I noticed they have a cyber Monday sale right now, so I might sign up for a year.
Tynker has many games in the app. But they are basically the same type of game with different themes. Your kid will gravitate to whatever theme they like (princess, dragon, space, etc). It would encourage him to reduce number of lines of code (i.e. use loops!) to get more stars. And we encouraged him to get 3 stars on every level. It also provided both a block based view or a code based view of the work you're doing,…
Thanks. I just subscribed.
Re: My son (9 yrs old) used plain JavaScript to make a game, and wants your feedback
#156Earlier quoted context omitted.
Agree 100%. Since dad helped, I was expecting to see sprites sheets, or some JS classes for some OOP, etc. Was pleasantly surprised to see how "simple" the approach was for such fun output with a decent amount of variety.
He doesn't understand what a sprite is, or really the motivation behind sprite sheets. To him they're just animated images he made in a tool. Internally he switches the "costumes" of characters (terminology he got from Scratch I believe).
That's so great. So many software engineers (myself included) tend to overcomplicate things.
Re: My son (9 yrs old) used plain JavaScript to make a game, and wants your feedback
#157Its awesome I love the mechanics.
Re: My son (9 yrs old) used plain JavaScript to make a game, and wants your feedback
#158Fantastic 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 c…
Godot is designed for beginners, but also those that don't like to get their hands too dirty with code. Also the web export is likely inferior to what he can do with JS directly.
With that in mind I'd recommend he sticks with JS. If he's interested in doing more advanced games he should look into Three.js, or Pixi, Babylon, Phaser and other engines (and eventually even just raw WebGL and using shaders), all within the browser. There's also the web audio API which can be used to synthesise sounds and music from scratch and then there's WASM which can be used as a compile target for languages like C and C++
JS itself can be used as a procedural, functional or OOP language so while it's easy to learn it has lots to master.
Finally, if he does want to move outside the browser, there might be better choices than Godot, like Raylib or Defold or even more professional engines like Unity or Unreal.
Not saying it's a bad choice, just that where he is now has a lot to offer, and there might be better alternatives depending on his skills and aims.
Re: My son (9 yrs old) used plain JavaScript to make a game, and wants your feedback
#159This is so cool!
I wish there was a way to know when an attack was charged up, or maybe show its progress in charging.
Re: My son (9 yrs old) used plain JavaScript to make a game, and wants your feedback
#160Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 thi…
I would also encourage the kid as much as possible, but I'd be doing them a disservice if I didn't also take the opportunity to teach them about the basics of keeping flowers alive in transit.