Game dev studio for kids?

As a kid/teenager I did some game development myself in multiple programming languages, and the easiest one I ever used was AMOS on the Commodore Amiga. It had all the tools you needed for creating simple games such as sprites, collision detection, forground/background sounds and so on.

I now have an 8 year old kid here myself who's asking if I can introduce him to games programming and I want to start with an easy route where we can get some results without writing 100's of code in C.

I know there are similar tools for the Windows platform. I guess both Dark Basic and Blitz Basic and influenced by AMOS, and running one of these in WINE would probably cause occasional weird behavior of different aspects.

I'm open to any ideas to best best method of attack this problem.

Lars

I would try starting him on something like python... You would have to work with him and figure out the basics of python display etc. first, but to be honest there aren't that many good development programs for games that are simple in any way shape or form

Dwood15 said: I would try starting him on something like python... You would have to work with him and figure out the basics of python display etc. first, but to be honest there aren't that many good development programs for games that are simple in any way shape or form

Yes, python has a library called pyGame that simplifies game creation. I have only looked over it cursorily, but there are a number of games in the repository built with pyGame.

There isn't really a dedicated IDE for it, though.

I learned a ton about the basics of programming working with TADS3, which is for making interactive fiction (text-only) games. Not real exciting, but it is a good way to learn object oriented programming.

Also, try LÖVE and see if that's useful. http://love2d.org/ - based on Lua.

Thanks alot, guys! pyGame looks great, but löve2d is probably an easier approach for a kid, so I think we'll go for that one in the first round. :)

Lars

Glad to have been of some assistance!

I had not expected Alice not to come up, so hereby. There may well be reasons to go with one of the earlier mentioned approaches but as an introductory approach Alice like a really good idea. I haven't actually used it yet myself to get people started on programming yet but it's definitely on my list if I ever had to. There's a great deal of videos out there, including this one.