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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

#161

Post by deathanatos »

veesahni wrote: post #107
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.

I was young at the time, but when I TA'd, the lesson I'd try to impart here is to take the time to learn the lexicon of the compiler error, and understand what it is trying to tell you. Then it's not just "code broke yo" but "is here is what is wrong."

Much better to learn to have a conversation with a deterministic compiler than an LLM that'll just cook up some random junk when it gets backed into a corner.

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

#162

Post by Cotterzz »

This is great work. I started around the same age, though I only had BASIC or assembly language and neither was very suitable, to the extent I almost gave up on game development. I didn't start building games with JS until 2-3 decades later, I really wish I'd had something like this back then.

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

#164

Post by alwa »

This is really cool! I had fun playing your game, thank you for sharing it with us!

I like the way you’ve made animations for the attacks. One thing I noticed is that the health counter goes down right away, before the attack hits and makes the background flash red.

I wonder if the health could go down at the same time the attack hits? It’s a small thing, but it might make the attack feel even more exciting!

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

#166

Post by Cotterzz »

das_keyboard wrote: post #46

> But there was one downside to AI. AI was like a human which is why you could talk to it like a human. But because it was like a human, it could also be wrong like a human. So I had to make sure that it wasn't getting the answer wrong. For which I would sometimes use Google Search. I really don't buy that this was written/created by an actual 9yr old. But this might just be my unhealthy pessimism/skepticism when it…

I started around the same age. Though sadly not with JS and modern browser tech. The most difficult concepts in use here are arrays and function calls. So quite possible for a clever 9 year old. If he was using an entity component system or monads I would be more skeptical

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

#167

Post by veesahni »

MarcScott wrote: post #165

He should enter it into https://online.coolestprojects.org/ Very cool game

OH that looks cool. Never heard of this, but I'm going to check it out. Looks like he can apply for the online showcase for 2025.

Thanks!

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

#168

Post by junon »

This is awesome. I love the graphics. Your son seems awesome!

How do I charge up my skills? It also doesn't show which skills are charged and which aren't - all the buttons look the same! Could the buttons maybe change color depending on if they're charged or not? Or maybe show how long until they are charged?

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

#169

Post by junon »

veesahni wrote: post #101
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 (coffe…

I started around 8 or 9 as well. Back then Javascript wasn't really around (was still called DHTML), so I started with Liberty Basic and shortly after that AutoIt, which I loved for a long while and would recommend if he wants to start doing things on the computer - simple to write but doesn't abstract the concepts of the machine away.

Your son has a seriously advantageous head start on life. Kudos!

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

#170

Post by sonjaqql »

This will be featured in my cross-discipline AI meeting this week. The blog article your son wrote was excellent - I will be pulling a few quotes.

I found it insightful that he used the microphone to move faster, and that he couldn’t always trust AI, because it can be just as confidently wrong as any human.

Both of you, keep up the good work!

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