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Ask Slashdot: Resources For Kids Who Want To Make Games?
Mr. Jones writes: My 11-year-old son is fascinated by games — game mechanics in particular. He has been playing everything from Magic to WarFrame since he was 5 years old. He seems mostly interested in creating the lore and associated mechanics of the games (i.e. how a game works). If it was only programming I could help him, but I am lost when it comes to helping him learn more formal ways of developing and defining gameplay. I really see a talent for this in him and I want to support it any way I can. Can you suggest any conferences, programs, books, websites, etc. that would help him learn?
http://www.gamedev.net/
~ Whence do you come, slayer of men, or where are you going, conqueror of space?
Maybe you could look at modding existing games as a start. Take what is already there and change it, learning how it works and how things like game logic are implemented. Modern games have some pretty powerful tools that allow the designers to do what you son wants to.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
It's my go-to show for talk about game mechanics. They post new videos on Youtube every week, consisting of 5-10 minute lectures on a topic.
Rather than asking the armchair gamers on Slashdot (myself included), read what some successful game designers say.
Here's Mark Rosewater, head designer for Magic: The Gathering, on game design 101: http://archive.wizards.com/Mag...
http://scratch.mit.edu/
http://michaelsmith.id.au
it's good enough for the purpose because you can make little changes in lua and immediately see them in action, which keeps a child motivated.
11yo may be a bit too early, but some kids could be up to the task.
We just did the Hour of Code at my workplace for the kids. Lots of tutorials for beginners on there. MichaelSmith above me also mentioned Scratch, and that's an excellent visual approach to learning procedural programming.
http://www.gamasutra.com/
Game construction kits:
Stuart Smith's Adventure Construction Set
Racing Destruction Set
Pinball Construction Set
Arcade Game Construction Kit
Shoot'Em-Up Construction Kit
Garry Kitchen's GameMaker
Run them on a real Commodore 64, or run them in an emulator. Images are available online for all these software titles.
See also: http://www.lemon64.com/?game_i...
I was going to post RPGMaker as well. It has some good tools for character and story development. Picked this up for my kid a year or so ago. She loves it.
"Freedom in the USA is not the ability to do what you want. It is the ability to stop others from doing what THEY want"
If you want a really pure and direct interaction with the mechanics that govern gameplay, D&D and related game systems are hard to beat. Humans are literally interpreting and implementing the rules of gameplay, and anybody who is literate can impose structure on an imaginary universe by understanding (and eventually writing their own) rulesets.
There are lots of different systems out there. Just getting him thinking about the rules of Risk vs Settlers of Catan (both arguably about conquest of a region, military or economic, respectively) would be a good way to start. D&D is obviously a standard (and 5th edition, which just came out, is excellent), but there are free and open source games out there (D&D 3.5 edition has all the rules available on the web, open-source style, and there are interesting derivatives like Legend from Rule of Cool) and they expose how games really work, and would help establish the kind of thinking that would be invaluable to someone looking to program game mechanics.
If you want something simple in that vein to start with, Settlers of Catan (as previously mentioned) is a great study for RTS-type game mechanics, and Mouse Guard is supposedly a simplified, kid-focused tabletop RPG.
My sarcasm detector is registering a 50% confidence metric, but I'd still rather work with, listen to, and play games by people who aren't ignorant about the war of 1812 and the cotton gin.
The author's free to say whatever he wishes, but Debian doesn't have to provide a mouthpiece for him. The software in question has some interesting oddities in it, which are probably the reason that the packaging request was denied, and rightly so. To whit:
The subroutine "nowomensrights", which repeatedly prints out "Just Say No To Women's Rights"
An occasional section where "Return to Casino Men" has a different color than the continuation "u" (completing the word "menu")
Odd references to feminism, women's rights, the 19th amendment, etc that trigger the aforementioned subroutine to be run
Easy bugfix: Remove the political and sexist bullshit, and I'm sure that the software would be accepted. Seriously, what other software accepted by Debian contains obvious political speech? This isn't about the software being unavailable, it's about the author's unpopular opinions, and the fact that it's not the author's right to make someone else listen to what he says.
I know exactly where this kid is coming from! In high school, I filled notebooks with pseudocode for how I wanted some of my game ideas to work. Getting into Dungeons and Dragons was a helpful experience as well, especially in the Dungeon Master role. If you want to deal with lore or game balancing, there's the perfect opportunity! I know from experience that finding resources on game DESIGN, as opposed to game PROGRAMMING, can be difficult. I spent a semester at university minoring in their brand-new Game Design program that was exactly not that, and was highly disappointed. Fortunately since you seem to be talking about games in general and not just video games, there's a wonderfully accepting and active community of designers and playtesters at BoardGameGeek.com: https://www.boardgamegeek.com/... There are frequent design competitions there as well, and board games are certainly an easier jumping-off point than most video games in terms of complexity. There are tons of excellent game design articles on BGG, as well as at GamaSutra, Polygon, and yes, MagicTheGathering.com as mentioned above. It might also be enlightening to study the well-documented changes over time to the other long-lived juggernaut of gaming, World Of Warcraft, with over a decade of design changes for various reasons, but then again it may take more subject knowledge to really understand why that game evolved the way it did. MTG is a much more self-contained study, but I would say also less dynamic and interesting in its changes. The recent announcement to remove the summer Core Set and have 2 2-set Blocks per year is a good example of a thoughtful change, though. A big part of good design is finding what parts of your creation don't work as well as they could, then ripping them out and fixing them. Finally, the world's best prototyping tool for most games may well be Microsoft Excel. If you want to quickly see how ideas interact, finding a way to describe and model them mathematically can be very useful.
Forget programming. Sit down with him and make a few board and card games.
Too many game designers these days look at the technology and the graphics and the monetarization and all the other crap and forget that first and foremost, there needs to be a game.
When you limit yourself to the bare essentials, you see the game for what it is, and learn to make games by focussing on what makes a game.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Especially if the game is about the War of 1812 or perhaps cotton gins.
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Sorry, I'm only a 1336 h4x0r.
Here is a resource I came across a few years back, Invent Your Own Computer Games With Python. When I reviewed it back then it looked pretty good as a first starting point, but I don't have first hand experience. Might want to check it out.
Its a really simple, fun, yet powerful visual game creation suite for beginner game creators.
http://www.3drad.com/
Your son can also expand into coding (angel script, C style) within the program when/if hes ready. Although, its not required as most items (waypoint system, plane, car, ai) are just a click away.
Heres an example game made in 3Drad:
http://www.freankexpo.net/533/...
Although the engine is now abandonware, there is a huge database of community tutorials/samples located here: http://www.3drad.com/forum
I'd highly recommend 3Drad as it simplifies everything, but it also gives you the ability to learn coding at your own pace, should you want to expand the game further.
And proof that the format works:
I started in 3Drad with only Qbasic programming knowledge from 15 years ago. I used the built in items first in 3Drad. After a time, i wanted to expand the game and started work tinkering with the programming (script object) side of 3Drad. Long story short, after 1-2 years in 3Drad, i learnt enough programming to move onto C++. 1 year later i coded this in c++ http://fuzon.co.uk/phpbb/viewt...
Give 3Drad a try, i'am sure your son will enjoy it.
My 9 year son really liked using the gamestarmechanic.com site. It's basically a game level designer disguised as a game.
Also, modding Minecraft might be something to look into.
Dont hate the media, become the media.
You should take a look at http://codecombat.com/ it is an interactive website where you can learn to code by playing a game. I excuse in advance if someone else already suggested this site, I read a few answers and couldn't find any reference to it. Because I think it's a good resource and the target age is in line with your kid's age I'm taking the risk to annoy with redundancy
From what you describe, I would look at Board Game Designers Forum (www.bgdf.com). It has a lot of information on the design process, helpful for both boardgames and computer games. And keeping with practice makes perfect, they have a monthly design competition. Take a look and see what you think.
Computational Thinking Patterns is a framework to explore and describe game play in ways that is independent from programming language. These patterns are based in phenomenology. These patterns are used in the Scalable Game Design project and mentioned by teachers are one of the most important abstractions that help student to analyze and build games. The same patterns are used to also build STEM simulations. Through theses patterns there is transfer from game design to STEM simulation building: http://sgd.cs.colorado.edu/wik...