awesome-gamemaker VS scratch-www

I'm in love with Gamemaker, which got me interested in programming: https://gamemaker.io

My 9-yo son has been making games with GameMaker https://gamemaker.io/

It's a popular framework for creating 2D HTML games and publishing them on sites like Crazy Games.

GameMaker has a lot of great tutorials and templates that makes it easy to get up and running. I usually just set him up with one of the existing game templates and let him loose on customizing the characters using the built-in tools. Then I help him customize the game interactions. GameMaker has two modes: one for visual flow editing and one for directly editing the code. It's a great onramp to learning to code with a super low barrier to entry.

I started my hobby game development journey with Game Maker Studio - https://gamemaker.io . Now I've switched to Godot for its simplicity and rich set of advanced features to actually build almost AAA games? if that's a thing.

Many popular game engines use this tiered approach including Unity, Unreal Engine, and Game Maker. However, many free and open-source software engines are released under the permissive MIT license.

Assuming you don't have any prior programming experience, since your goal is Undertale modding it might be best to start by learning how to use GameMaker (with the GML programming language, not the drag-and-drop): https://gamemaker.io

List of useful links for gamemaker https://github.com/bytecauldron/awesome-gamemaker

GameMaker Studio 2 Creator 12 Months

LiveCode is about the closest literal logical successor to HyperCard.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiveCode?wprov=sfti1

That said, I think Scratch is a better learning environment these days and you can develop workable apps in the style of HyperCard. There are plenty of tutorials, documentation, and examples to work from.

https://scratch.mit.edu

and https://codecombat.com, which has been around for a while now.

I think this paradigm (navigating a character using "move" function invocations) is good but kind of exhausts its usefulness after a while. I question whether my daughter learns coding this way or just is playing a turn based top down platformer. The most code like thing is when you use 'loops' to have characters repeat sequences of moves. I think when kids grok these things these apps become just types of glofiried education flavoured video games. There are a lot of things in kodable for instance that I feel are just basic web games with coding terms slapped on it.

https://scratch.mit.edu/ is more like 'programming' imo, even at the level of the objective -- having a blank canvas to create something. It seems a little advanced for my kids right now though.

+1 Scratch! My son started with it, then expanded into Roblox/Lua.

Children can download other people's games and experiment there. Scratch also has pre-made art, sounds, music.

https://scratch.mit.edu/

Scratch.mit.edu is a highly-recommended place to start [1] https://scratch.mit.edu/

> Scratch is the world’s largest coding community for children and a coding language with a simple visual interface that allows young people to create digital stories, games, and animations. Scratch is designed, developed, and moderated by the Scratch Foundation, a nonprofit organization. [2]

1: https://scratch.mit.edu/

https://scratch.mit.edu/ (Scratch version 2)

Someone who uses scratch.mit.edu (like me)

Now that I think of it, I did start game development on scratch before going right into java (because of minecraft).