Hello Everyone,
I’ve got a 10 year old daughter who loves making games in scratch, but she’s starting to run into that boundary where it stops working for you, and starts working against you.
She wants to make an adventure game in the vein of a trimmed down “legend of Zelda: link to the past”
I’ve looked at snap and gamefroot as potential next steps. Would consider a “true” language like JavaScript or python, but I’m worried she would be daunted if the ramp is too steep (maybe with the correct libraries/frameworks?) The immediate feedback and low ramp scratch offers are still important.
Anyone have any wisdom to share? Or point me to something I’ve missed?
Thanks
if you were to teach her a “true” language I would say python and introduce turtle or some like that at first then as she learns python more and more you could look at showing her pygame albeit kinda advanced personally the basics aren’t to bad
Roblox Studio. I hate it’s predatory economy but my 7 yo has been building some random worlds and he and his friends have a blast just running around in them for hours. The fact it’s so easy to share and play with friends is really a big motivator. It doesn’t cost anything.
Thanks for the suggesting.
She likes Roblox, but I haven’t check out the build tools at all.
And yeah…the monetization is…troubling.
It’s by no means perfect, but Lua with LÖVE is pretty straightforward for 2D games, and gives you a Real™️ programming language as well.
Alternatively, Godot is a modern open source game engine and framework, and if you stick to 2D and the built-in GDScript, it comes with a lot of nice things for creating levels, maps, animations etc. However, perhaps for a 10yo the barrier to entry might be a bit high.
Also, love2d is very similar to the lua sdk the playdate uses, so it’d be easy to port over to a real device!
Thanks for the suggestion. I’ll do some reading on it. Never worked with Lua before. Maybe Dad gets to learn too!
I would recommend gamemaker.io. Although I haven’t used it in a long time, I think their philosophy is still the same. You get to use no-code to get your feet wet. When you need more flexibility you can use their custom scripting language. So you essentially get to become acquainted with their technology while programming in no-code and then when you switch to coding, it’s not as big of a leap since you’re not transitioning to a completely new technology.
Have you looked at Godot?
That’s pretty cool. Definitely going to dig into that. I didn’t realize how well developed it was.
