This is fantastic; your son did a great job! I’m always excited to see young people take on challenging projects!
thanks for checking it out :)
My son (9 yrs old) used plain JavaScript to make a game, and wants your feedback
181–190 of 493 posts
Re: My son (9 yrs old) used plain JavaScript to make a game, and wants your feedback
#182Earlier quoted context omitted.
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. Th…
haha :)
For this version, I stopped at "does it work? alright, move forward"
Re: My son (9 yrs old) used plain JavaScript to make a game, and wants your feedback
#183Interesting concept. Reminds me of final fantasy.
The text in the red boxes is hard to read. Suggest changing to white.
The more advanced weapons that are locked actually have easier questions. I would expect them to be harder.
I can’t tell when I can use the advanced weapons. Suggest showing the charge level along with Hp.
Great job!
Re: My son (9 yrs old) used plain JavaScript to make a game, and wants your feedback
#184Out of curiosity, what courses, books, websites etc did you give to your son to learn JavaScript? I have a similarly aged child and I haven't found anything they like so far.
Re: My son (9 yrs old) used plain JavaScript to make a game, and wants your feedback
#185Wow, this is wildly refreshing. Definitely more interesting and fun than any crud bullshit I do every day.
Re: My son (9 yrs old) used plain JavaScript to make a game, and wants your feedback
#186Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 th…
I was originally interested in Godot because it had a web export. I feel like building on the web helps with shareability (eg: this post!)
But the "open web" seems to give limitless potential. Canvas, network APIs, lots of interesting libraries to build on, etc. I wasn't familiar with the ability to synthesize sounds - that would be interesting to look into.
Appreciate the feedback! :)
Re: My son (9 yrs old) used plain JavaScript to make a game, and wants your feedback
#187Ah, 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 th…
Also, looking at the code, I don't think you use "question_array" or "answer_array". And I don't know what "utah2" means. Sorry I'm not great at games but I like looking at code and interfaces.
Kids dad here.
Those arrays were for a past version. I nudged him towards randomly generated question/answers. That's currently dead code.
"utah2" -- haha, his variable names are sometimes not useful here. We visited Utah months before he wrote the game, so that inspired that variable name I guess! This version I wasn't nitpicking not he code as long as it worked. The bar higher for the next version.
.. and yes, spelling issues are top thing to fix for next version! At the moment, he can code better than he can spell.
Thanks for taking a peek under the hood :)
Re: My son (9 yrs old) used plain JavaScript to make a game, and wants your feedback
#188This is awesome, and the graphics remind me of my mspaint.exe graphics I used to load into Game Maker 4.0 in 2001 to make games as an 11 year old :) It gave me a lifelong obsession with programming, and I'm still a principal engineer today
haha awesome :)
It starts with a small seed. Once planted, you realize you can do anything and that software is everywhere.
Re: My son (9 yrs old) used plain JavaScript to make a game, and wants your feedback
#189Interesting concept. Reminds me of final fantasy. The text in the red boxes is hard to read. Suggest changing to white. The more advanced weapons that are locked actually have easier questions. I would expect them to be harder. I can’t tell when I can use the advanced weapons. Suggest showing the charge level along with Hp. Great job!
Appreciate the feedback. Will share this my son!
Re: My son (9 yrs old) used plain JavaScript to make a game, and wants your feedback
#190Out of curiosity, what courses, books, websites etc did you give to your son to learn JavaScript? I have a similarly aged child and I haven't found anything they like so far.
The full story of his journey is here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42313045
Specifically for JS? I didn't give him anything material actually. I gave him a serious of small challenges starting with: "write a function that displays hello world on the screen" ... he already know HTML/CSS and he talked to Gemini to figure out the best way to use a function in HTML and it guided him towards JS. He give me a solution in a JS console, with a function that he executed.
Then I built on that with more challenges. He continued to work with Gemini. He talks about how he uses Gemini in his blog post, it's an interesting learning technique he found.
So mostly he's learning by doing. He's figuring out "how to do X" either using a hint from me or just by asking Gemini which gives him some guidance. Then he has to figure out how to apply the hint/samples to his actual game. His IDE has no LLM built-in, he uses the LLM from the browser.