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Blitz3d. It's a tool for writing 3d games. The nice thing about it is that you can do complex things with very little coding but is, however, very limited. The demo is free and might be a good way to capture his attention.

So I'd recommend something simple that isn't frustrating, but also allows easy access to things kids like (graphics stuff).

I learned programming at a very young age, bouncing between BASIC on an Apple IIe and QBasic on my dad's 286. The cool thing about the different forms of BASIC were that it made graphics stuff (my interest) easy to set up and use. One command to set the screen mode, and another to set pixels, draw circles, boxes, or whatever. Page flipping stuff was a little more advanced, but supported in QBasic too, IIRC.

Of course, BASIC teaches all kinds of terrible programming practices, but if the user ends up getting frustrated or bored and giving up early, your technically superior practices and language choice won't matter.

I doubt kids have interest in the code itself so much as what you can do with it. That is to say, they'll get bored with in-depth algorithm descriptions and things that are functionally cool, but don't show an interesting end result beyond "Hey look. It sorted the list. Whee!" I know that if I'd started with that instead of just naively coding whatever I wanted to, I probably wouldn't be as far along as I am now, graduating at a university with a com sci degree.

So, in short: Dazzle them with cool graphics/sound/whatever, not cool algorithms.

I haven't had more than a glance at it, but perhaps you might consider a modern version of BASIC that's designed for that kind of thing like Blitz Basic. Again, I haven't used this, but it might be just the thing to keep interest, which I believe is the most important part.

As for Basic 'Blitz' basic on the Amiga in the early 90s was a pretty cool language.

Still exists as Blitz3D/BlitzMax on Windoze.

It is (and was back on the AmigaOS) pretty damn far from most people's ideas of "Basic" though - it is (and was, you get the idea) always intended to be suitable for pro-quality commercial game production. Someone familiar with 8-bit C64/Microsoft-style BASICs wouldn't know what hit them. Someone familiar with C or Pascal would get it pretty rapidly though.

Wouldn't this be a similar way to teach them the same ideas: http://www.blitzbasic.com/Community/posts.php?topi c=44978

Layne

These are both much cheaper than RealBasic (PureBasic is only USD 69, BlitzMax with it's gui is $105) and they both provide Windows, Linux, and Max OS. In addition, they expose the entire application code to you--you see exactly how everything is created which as I understand it is quite unlike RealBasic.

My biggest problem with RealBasic though is by far it's price tag. Pro edition is $399.95 for each operating system. That's just...well that doesn't make sense given two alternatives that do the same thing (though I will admit RealBasic has a very nice IDE for the most part, other than only showing you one function at a time--at least in default mode).

PureBasic may not be able to compete with Real, but I believe that BlitzMax can really give Real a run for it's money. It's a good OO language with a low price point, pleasant syntax, and great interaction between other language sources (C, C++ and ObjectiveC source files can be imported directly into an application).

I strongly recommend looking at BlitzMax and their GUI toolkit MaxGUI. Price here is USD $80 + $25, but it is a solid environment that can interface C libraries directly, even compile libraries like SQLite from source directly into the application. No runtime required. http://blitzbasic.com/Products/_index_.php

Another option which I advocate, and which may be even better for your situation, is PureBasic. This is only USD $69 and comes with it's GUI toolkit, no added cost. Includes a GUI designer to give you some basic GUI code to get things started. No runtime required. http://www.purebasic.com/

Both of these languages do not require a runtime, compile to native code on Linux, Windows and Max OS (probably not something you need to worry about but it's there for free if you need it--in RealBasic you have to pay another $400 or so for each platform).

A very underrated development environment is BlitzMax http://www.blitzbasic.com/

It was created by Mark Sibley, (who also created the venerable blitzbasic for the Amiga over 15 years ago). It's very simple to learn, is available for Windows, Linux, and OsX, and has something of a cult following.

I'm trying to get my 12 year old brother-in-law into programming. I started programming Applesoft Basic a million years ago on my Dad's Apple IIc. Things are much more complicated nowadays.

My little brother's main motivation seems to be making video games. I had the same fantasy when I was his age. I tried showing him perl on linux because I figured that was simple and useful. Didn't quite work out.

I got him a book called "Game Programming for Teens" for Christmas. It seems to have really caught his attention. It comes with a language called BlitzBasic. At first I thought it was silly to teach him a language that is never used by any professional programmer, but it's actually working out well. It's getting him started in the basic concepts such as loops, variables and functions and is able to give him quick rewards such as graphics and sound. If you're looking to teach a young person, I'd highly recommend it.

Jon Baudanza
Lost his slashdot account long ago..

It was also used to make the very excellent racing game: Skidmarks and Skidmarks 2

I too, dabbled a bit in BlitzBasic, and I was very impressed - it produced very fast code, due to the fact it was actually compiled as opposed to interpreted.

http://www.blitzbasic.com/
for more info, and screenshots of what is possible in this language

(It'll get its own 3D engine next year, too. See Blitz 3D for evidence that this isn't some silly fantasy!)

Blitz Max, a variant of Blitz Basic comes out on OS X in a couple of months' time, meaning a small but growing army of coders should be putting stuff out for the Mac soon (especially since they just have to recompile the code they've already written for Windows -- no port costs to worry about).

Gallery of stuff created with Blitz

Blitz Max, a variant of Blitz Basic comes out on OS X in a couple of months' time, meaning a small but growing army of coders should be putting stuff out for the Mac soon (especially since they just have to recompile the code they've already written for Windows -- no port costs to worry about).

Gallery of stuff created with Blitz

Speaking of which, see Blitz 3D's community of developers, many of whom are very keen to port to Linux, especially if it's just a recompile away. Cue Blitz Max (an OO-enhanced version of the current Blitz language), set to come to Linux and OS X later in the year.

Amateur Blitz developers have produced stuff like this, a lot of which puts most existing Linux games to shame (OK, so Frozen Bubble can live)...

• Platypus
• Best Friends
• Juno Remix
• Cletus Clay
• Rocket Boards

Blitz Basic

"Quick doom3 normal mapping demo in Blitz3d"

... so the game itself better be good!

Hey, if you want a criminally fun language for games, try Blitz Basic ... compiled, not interpreted.

You might try something like BlitzBasic or DarkBasic. They both tie in with DirectX, but free you from any low level tinkering. Letting you concentrate on game play. Which I think is really what indie games are about. I've played with DarkBasic a bit, and you can get very sophisticated games built very, very quickly.

The downside is that they only work on windows. And you might not exactly get the performance you'd get writing it directly in C or anything. But from what I've seen, it can be really fast, and it lets you concentrate on the *game*.

They should have written it in Blitz Basic, like the original Amiga version! Worms 3D would be a cinch in Blitz.

For anyone who's interested in Indy developing, here's a good tool to start with - Blitz 3D . It's a programming language that's been around since the good old Amiga days, and it provides a very stable and fast 3D engine, coupled with support for just about every sound/image format imaginable. Compared to most commercial engines, it's quite affordable, and it provides the "whole package", not just the graphics engine. This being Slashdot, I should note that it is currently Windows-only, but there is a multiplatform, OpenGL based version in the pipeline.

For your kids you could always invest in Blitz Basic. It's relatively simple, and can produce some great stuff quickly. (Anyone who had an Amiga may remember the game "Skidmarkz". That was written in Blitz.) And yes, it's available for the PC.

I was facing this predicament recently and found a few solutions. They're all BASIC dialects, but I learned BASIC on the Apple II decades ago and still turned out to be a decent programmer when I learned "real" languages. (Personally, I think that if you can be "ruined" by using a language, you were too brittle to be a programmer anyway.)

The first was BLASSIC, which is as close to the BASIC dialects of early personal computers as it gets, complete with line numbers, PEEK, and POKE. The cool thing about it is that it supports simple graphics, which is what really got me interested in the early 80's. It's free and purports to be multiplatform, though I've only tried it under Linux.

The other two interesting BASICs were DarkBasic and Blitz. DarkBasic actually consists of several different packages. There's one called the 3D Game Designer which lets you create first-person shooters by dragging and dropping. When your little one has exhausted the rather limited possibilities there, you can upgrade to the full DarkBasic package and he or she can begin implementing simple behaviors in dirt-simple BASIC.

The Blitz product is primarily interesting (to me, anyway) because they offer a dedicated 2D version of the language devoted to 80's-style arcade games, which are orders of magnitude easier to program than 3D games for a novice programmer. Blitz doesn't use line numbers and optionally supports C-style syntax for function calls, and has a GUI toolkit that is pretty easy to use once your beginner gets a toehold in programming.

My project with my daughter was a clone of Pac Man with Blitz. It took several weekends, much of which had more to do with helping her understand cartesian coordinates than actual programming, but in the end she did most of the coding for a single level of Pac Man, and she was quite proud of herself. I doubt she'll pursue it very far -- which wasn't the point anyway -- but now she has a much better understanding of how software works.

If you're willing to take a slightly harder but more rewarding route with the kids, I'd suggest Blitz Basic, available over at BlitzBasic.com . Unlike many of the other applications mentioned already, it's a true programming language, with a nice clean syntax (somewhere between C and Basic) and very good support for a wide variety of media. It's also blazing fast in comparison. I'd suggest this route as a sort of middle road between game programming libraries such as Allegro, which are likely to be frustrating for such young kids, and pre-packaged game-makers like Klik-n-Play, which they will very likely find too limiting. Also, there's already a large, very newbie-friendly community over at BlitzCoder.com , of which I am an active member. The site has very active and helpful forums, as well as a broad range of tutorials written for everyone from complete beginniners to experienced programmers.

Check out BlitzPlus/Blitz 3D here...

BlitzBasic has some great game dev tools specifically made for manipulating 2D/3D graphics on the screen. It is essentially a full-blown language with elements borrowed from both basic and C. Very easy to learn/use. You can do in a few lines what would take hundreds or thousands of lines in other languages. Plus, there is already a wide user base that you can get help and tips from.

A few years back my ex-girlfriend and I went shopping for a game for her.

She liked computer gaming but had one small problem: She would get motion sickness from playing 3d games (FPS were the worst).

So we agreed that a platform game was probably the best option for her. Guess what, not a single store had a platform game for the PC, NOT ONE.

In the end I gave up and downloaded a slew Commodore 64 games and an emulator, worked like a charm.

On another note, if you want to write your own game and avoid a lot of the hassle go and check out Blitz Basic. Easy and allows you to focus on being creative. The downside is that it is windows only.

I've been hanging out in a forum where a lot of aspiring (and professional) game designers hang out, and one suggestion that keeps popping up for people looking to get into writing games is Blitz.

Blitz is a programming language designed for writing games. It started out on the Amiga, and was ported to Windows some time ago. It has very impressive 3d graphics capability built in (if you get the 3d capable version, and not the cheaper 2d only version).

I haven't tried it myself, as my attempts at game writing have been in OpenGL under OSX, but it looks quite impressive.

I also want some Daily Feed archive CDs: http://www.dailyfeed.com

Thank you for thinking of me Taco.

See Blitz 3D... for evidence of its capabilities, see Skidmarks Construction Kit

Blitz Basic for the PC is available now from www.blitzbasic.com. Its also out in the shops in the UK but only starting to appear in the US. Its also pretty damn fast and easy to write games for.

--

Head to blitzbasic.com, download the demo and get started :)

3D due out mid-2001, so get learning with Blitz 2D now!

This Spam is over...

Can anybody say "type-in games from Compute!s Gazette"?

Yes! For your average 1984 BASIC shoot-em-up.

I imagine that some of the 3D models in use on many of todays games would takes up an entire magazine by themselves. Even if all the graphical and audio data was supplied on a CD with the magazine, the code would still be huge for anything but the most simple of games. I imagine that the code could be included on the CD though, and an article in the magazine devoted to describing bits of the code and how they work as opposed to just a brute force listing - much more useful for the end programmer.

Between this and the new Blitz Basic here a whole new world of BASIC programming games and stuff could occur. I feel that the fun might be returning to cumputing after a while away.

Sure, BASIC is, well, basic, but in terms of getting something done it could be pretty good. No having to chase pointers through twisted evil C code anymore, just the ability to express and create your ideas quickly and rapidly.

As long as it isn't interpreted. :-)

http://www.blitzbasic.com/

This makes those games seem way cooler to the kids, way more sinister than they really are. That means they'll be much more enjoyable when they get their older friends to buy them!

And a plug: you can make violent games of your own with Blitz Basic!

http://www.blitzbasic.com/