Slashdot Mirror
Teaching Kids to Make Games?
FreakerSFX asks: "My son has shown an avid interest in video games like most kids his age. What's different now is that he insists that he wants to learn how to build his own game. He's 9 and fairly gifted from a mathematics and computer standpoint and certainly capable of learning basic programming. What tools/books are recommended for a neophyte computer game programmer?" I remember one of my first exposures to computer languages was Logo,
which was a language that seems perfectly suited to young children. There is a Windows version available here that seems like it would be perfect for the development of simple games, especially for youngsters. What languages, and language resources, are you aware of that might be suitable for youngsters with an interest in creating games, and learning programming?
I was just looking into text only games [Interactive Fiction] recently for the first time in a looooong time. I found some fun ones that were done in the TADS language which is apparently made just for that. The site I downloaded the runtime environment from also had a compiler. Check out tads.org For some background. I think an IF game is a perfect starter for a kid.
That's all I can find in a quick scan of my bookmarks from way back when...
"Go to CNN [for a] spell-checked, fact-checked summary" -- CmdrTaco
Try this post:
"I have been asked to teach a week-long class on Computer Game Design for a small group of computer literate kids, around 9-13 years old. My plan is to have them create a simple game, while exposing them to aspects of story design, artwork, animation, and simple programming. To this end, I'm looking for a 'game construction kit' that is simple enough that they can have a working game by the end of the week with some guidance. Anyone remember the 'Arcade Game Construction Kit' on the Commodore 64? Adventure Game Studio looks good, but it may be too complex. The genre is flexible, but it does need to generate a distributable Win32 binary that they can take home. Are there any Windows packages, public domain or otherwise, that can do this, especially any designed for kids?"
god i need a fscking life...i've tearned into jeeves.
Just to clarify for those doing searches, it's Cocoa (just like the OSX/NS framework).
And mods, this is the direct answer to the Ask Slashdot question, the tool built for expressly this purpose. A friend taught his 8-year old daughter how to use it and she was absolutely delighted.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
A lot of the people here are advocating the hardcore, learn-to-program approach.
;)
But not everyone that wants to make games wants to learn programming, and this was a source of some frustration in my own younger years, because although I had tools available, I saw what I was going on, and I had plenty of ideas, my drive to actually create code was almost zero. So I let things sit quite a long time, and was almost entirely dependent on finding tools that minimized the amount of structural work needed(graphics routines, objects, tile engines) and maximized the amount of control I had over the critical segments of gameplay, like collisions and shooting. The best free one around like that today is Mark Overmars' Game Maker. It allows you to do some very complex things with a C-subset scripting language, while at the same time providing a strong IDE and toolset. It's unfortunately tied to DirectX and Win32, though, and it's also not an opensourced project(for a $15 registration fee you get a couple more options), but the free version is by no means crippleware, and for what it does it's very good. Also the forums are quite funny because the majority of the posters are kids playing at game development, and not even really having the smarts to do well with such a great tool.
Now I'm a freshman in college and plan to get at least a BA in CS, not because I like it, but because it's going to keep pushing me to advance my skills until I'm well capable of making games of all complexities. (I plan to go into shareware/independent gaming, so learning all skills equally well is a Good Idea. Also a good recipe for using up all my spare time.)
I've moved on from Game Maker to Pygame since I started college; my current greatest accomplishment with it is doing a scrolling tile engine(with all sizes, screen border etc. adjustable); it took three times for my code to be really anything close to clean, and after the second time I decided OOP is not a magic bullet for anything. My next project is to add a modular framework that includes the tile engine; using this framework, users will be able to make maps that play differently, because each map will load some Python code and objects in addition to settings for the tiles. It's kind of confusing me, which the tile engine did too, the first time, but I think that if I keep at it I'll get somewhere, and from there it'll just snowball until all of the sudden the game I'm planning is done hehe