Ask HN: Platform for 11 year old to create video games?

1

Scratch

I remember a few post of games made by children in Scratch https://scratch.mit.edu/ For example: * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23892698 (My daughter tried to use Scratch, but it's too difficult to cut&paste and move blocks of code, she preferred a text based programming language, so YMMV.).

#Kids Education #Programming #Coding 569 social mentions

2

Twine

If you don't mind doing choose your own adventure style stories, I'd recommend Twine. It's a low-to-no code way to write branching stories, and you can add variables and conditional branching if you want to add a little bit of code. It creates a playable website of your story when it compiles. I do a lot of heavy coding but I still play around with Twine sometimes because it's fun. I also sometimes prototype the branching dialogue and/or story in my games using that as a tool as well, because I don't have to code anything. https://twinery.org/ There's also a subreddit for discussing twine games: https://www.reddit.com/r/twinegames/ A couple examples of how far you can take the engine:.

#Visual Novel Engine #Conversion Optimization #IDE 282 social mentions

3

GameMaker Studio

Game maker studio might fit the bill: https://gamemaker.io/en.

#Game Development #Game Engine #3D Game Engine 37 social mentions

4

RPG in a Box

The visual programming style may turn off experienced programmers, but it's a full game engine, there is a big community of other kids out there, and at this stage, programming is about basic concepts like variables, conditions, loops and functions, which are all represented here. And of course, game development is about more than code: Scratch also lets you add sound and graphics, and has an easy to use actor model. There's also a neat voxel-based RPG engine called RPG in a Box (https://rpginabox.com/). For Python, there's pygame, which requires a lot more code, but let's you make sprite-based games in a "real" programming language, if that's more your speed. Python also has classic turtle graphics, but that doesn't usually get you very far for making games. Finally: I've used all of these (and other) tools with kids in that age group, as a mentor at events like Hack The Future (https://hackthefuture.org/) and Hour of Code (https://hourofcode.com/). Look for an event like this in your area, they are really fun to attend!

#Game Development #Game Engine #3D Game Engine 4 social mentions

5

Nature of Code

For anyone wanting to do this in JS, check out Dan Shiffman’s <i>Nature of Code</i> https://natureofcode.com/ Uses p5js, so nicer than pure canvas.

#Open Source #Design Books #Books 27 social mentions

6

Snap

I upgraded my son from Scratch to Snap! (https://snap.berkeley.edu/). Snap has a much higher ceiling, including collections, first-class code pieces, higher-order functions etc. It pretty openly describes itself as a "Scheme disguised as Scratch" :-) A pragmatic pedagogical thing I love with Snap! Is the ease of creating custom blocks, including macros / custom "C-shaped" control structures. If you have some time, this allows you to "scaffold" helpers that will allow him to create interesting stuff while focusing on things you want him to learn and hiding issues you don't. * Example: I wanted to teach rendering a custom costume with e.g. Health bar or text label. My son is already familiar with Snap!'s turtle-drawing primitives that can render lines & text but there was an impedance mismatch — you draw on the screen, and it does support snapshotting all current drawings to create a costume, but using that involves some careful save-and-restore of much global state (e.g. Pen color). I built him a "draw costume" block that takes a body of turtle-drawing commands and affects only current character's costume.

#Kids Education #Programming #Social Media Apps 30 social mentions

7

Haxe

Have you checked out https://haxe.org/.

#Programming Language #OOP #Generic Programming Language 48 social mentions

8

replit

I have used Kaboom https://kaboomjs.com/ to help a diverse group of kids build a simple 2d game together. It’s a toolkit specifically geared toward 2d platform we type games but it could be adapted to make other 2d games. I liked that it was just JavaScript under the hood so you can introduce many programming language concepts, but the engine makes it easy to get things going with very little code. There are also lots of opportunity to focus on design aspects over pure code. You can also use it online with Replit https://replit.com/@replit/Kaboom#code/main.ts which lets you get up and running quickly and share your work online easily. Apparently it is no longer actively maintained by Replit, but I’m guessing it still works fine and there is also a community fork: <a href="https://github.com/kaplayjs/kaplay?tab=readme-ov-file">https://github.com/kaplayjs/kaplay?tab=readme-ov-file</a>.

#Programming #Programming Tools #IDEs And Text Editors 624 social mentions

9

itch.io

As several people has pointed out here, don't focus on programming. That can kill the urge to make games pretty quick. And an important thing often overlooked, is prototyping. Whatever kind of game you are making, find a way to make a fast mockup using paper or whatever - and test it. That being said, you should take a look at simple game engines like; Twine, GDevelop, TyranoBuilder and PICO-8. Remember; the easier they make it to do simple stuff, the harder is it to do difficult stuff :) To see what kind of games normal people make, check out https://itch.io.

#Games #Online Shopping #Gift Cards 7501 social mentions

10

microStudio

#Development #Gaming Software #Game Engine 9 social mentions

Decker is fairly "powerpoint-like" in the sense that it's organized around a set of "cards" that can be drawn on. It's designed to allow users to create simple interactive projects without any programming, but there's also a powerful scripting language available for more sophisticated projects. http://beyondloom.com/decker/ Some examples of how people are using Decker: https://itch.io/games/tag-decker.

#Game Development #Game Engine #IDE 14 social mentions

12

Phaser

Https://phaser.io/. It’s more of a game framework in JavaScript with built in libraries for collision. The getting started tutorial is decent/short and gives a good idea of what is going on.

#Game Development #Game Engine #3D Game Engine 124 social mentions

13

Gamefroot

You can try https://make.gamefroot.com/ it’s specifically designed for kids aged 6 to 14. It’s used by a bunch of primary schools to teach kids programming via games. It’s drag and drop interface where I believe you can drop into JavaScript as well. Haven’t used it myself but met the founders at a game conference.

#Games #Game Development #Game Engine 2 social mentions

14

dot big bang

A friend of mine works on DotBigBang which is pretty approachable. May be worth giving it a try! https://dotbigbang.com/.

#3D #Game Development #Vector Graphic Editor 5 social mentions

15

Blockly

Scratch is fantastic. There are also a number of similar (block-based) tools that let you create your own custom blocks and see the code behind them - e.g. Blockly (https://developers.google.com/blockly).

#Developer Tools #Web Frameworks #Kids Education 31 social mentions

16

Defold Engine

Humble Bundle has a Godot bundle is available for the next day or so. That might be a good one to look at if you're ok with leaning into code a bit (gdscript is very very similar to python). https://www.humblebundle.com/software/learn-godot-43-complete-course-bundle-software Also check out the RPG Maker bundle. That's pretty point-and-click. You can have something basic up and running in a couple minutes (literally just paint your tiles onto a map and click Go and you'll have a little jrpg). If you use the newest version, you can script it in Javascript. One major selling point here is that their "runtime package" (RTP) comes with a TON of game assets to use, so you don't have to track down/make art if you don't want to (you <i>can</i>, but I often get blocked on art when I'm playing with game dev). https://www.humblebundle.com/software/gotcha-gotcha-presents-ultimate-rpg-maker-experience-software GBStudio is another good (free) one to look at. It's point and click for the most part and if you get a flash cart, you can play your game on a real Gameboy. Definitely not gonna be the most flashy, but it's a good exercise in making something fun with limited resources available. https://www.gbstudio.dev GDevelop is another no-/low-code option: https://gdevelop.io Defold is another scripting-heavy option (Lua): https://defold.com.

#Game Development #Game Engine #3D Game Engine 50 social mentions

17

GDevelop

Humble Bundle has a Godot bundle is available for the next day or so. That might be a good one to look at if you're ok with leaning into code a bit (gdscript is very very similar to python). https://www.humblebundle.com/software/learn-godot-43-complete-course-bundle-software Also check out the RPG Maker bundle. That's pretty point-and-click. You can have something basic up and running in a couple minutes (literally just paint your tiles onto a map and click Go and you'll have a little jrpg). If you use the newest version, you can script it in Javascript. One major selling point here is that their "runtime package" (RTP) comes with a TON of game assets to use, so you don't have to track down/make art if you don't want to (you <i>can</i>, but I often get blocked on art when I'm playing with game dev). https://www.humblebundle.com/software/gotcha-gotcha-presents-ultimate-rpg-maker-experience-software GBStudio is another good (free) one to look at. It's point and click for the most part and if you get a flash cart, you can play your game on a real Gameboy. Definitely not gonna be the most flashy, but it's a good exercise in making something fun with limited resources available. https://www.gbstudio.dev GDevelop is another no-/low-code option: https://gdevelop.io Defold is another scripting-heavy option (Lua): https://defold.com.

#Game Development #Game Engine #3D Game Engine 77 social mentions

18

p5.js

Https://p5js.org/ Basic 60 frames a second canvas and the rest is JavaScript. Pair that with the excellent Coding Train series https://youtube.com/@thecodingtrain To get around the "serve a webpage locally" problem, you could either have Python or Node serve a webpage, or I once rigged up a samba share and a small web server on a home server and turned a kid loose on it ... It didn't take, I should have spent more time helping them daily on it. But that's an idea.

#Javascript UI Libraries #Charting Libraries #Flowcharts 146 social mentions

19

YouTube

Https://p5js.org/ Basic 60 frames a second canvas and the rest is JavaScript. Pair that with the excellent Coding Train series https://youtube.com/@thecodingtrain To get around the "serve a webpage locally" problem, you could either have Python or Node serve a webpage, or I once rigged up a samba share and a small web server on a home server and turned a kid loose on it ... It didn't take, I should have spent more time helping them daily on it. But that's an idea.

#Video #Video Platform #Social Media 1869 social mentions

20

Stencyl

My 11 year old cousin loves Scratch. He's made several games and "movies" using it. Another more powerful alternative is Stencyl: https://stencyl.com/.

#Game Development #Game Engine #3D Game Engine 5 social mentions

21

Sonic Pi

Not specifically game related, but adjacent. Sonic Pi (https://sonic-pi.net/) is designed for making music specifically with kids in mind, and they might accidentally learn a whole bunch of programming concepts as a side-effect.

#Music Generation #Music Tools #Live Music Generation 67 social mentions

22

textadventures.co.uk

On a smaller scale, there's an entire genre of 'interactive fiction' text games a la Zork. The scripting / authoring is fairly easy to pick up. https://textadventures.co.uk/.

#Visual Novel Engine #IDE #Project Management 21 social mentions