colobot VS scratch-www

While I never had this, there are a series of games that my brother and I, (and later my school) used to learn similar concepts! https://colobot.info/

Not a Steam game, but an amazing programming puzzle game that I keep looking for a modern version of.

Year: 2001

Title: Colobot

Link: https://colobot.info/

My description: Use code to direct wheeled, hover and flying bots to construct, combat and explore.

Description: Colobot (Colonize with Bots) is an educational, post apocalyptic real-time strategy video game featuring 3D graphics, created by Swiss developer Epsitec SA. The objective of the game is to find a planet for colonization by the human race by establishing a basic infrastructure on the surface and eliminating any alien life forms endangering the expedition. The game takes place on the Earth, Moon, and seven fictional planets. The main feature of the game, which makes it educational, is the possibility for players to program their robots using a programming language similar to C++ or Java.

I remember reading about this game back when they opened the source code. Looks like it moved here, but latest commit was almost 2 years ago. r/Colobot haven't seen much activity either.

Oh if you look for programming, try Colobot , it is now 20 years old...

CoLoBot (Gold Edition)?

Well, you program it in java like language with proper syntax. https://colobot.info/

Did you get Colobot Gold Edition? Available here : https://colobot.info/

a very different take on programmable rts is https://colobot.info/

this is a very old game that has seen an open source release (including free assets) somewhat recently.

the original game is fully playable on modern platforms; lately some multiplayer features were added that look quite a bit of fun.

this is an early-noughties 3d rts, with the twist that all units (including the enemy, though this is obscured during normal gameplay) run user-editable code that can be changed in-game.

the rts campaign is supplemented by exercises designed to introduce complete beginners to programming (e.g. write a maze solver or a waypoint-driver flight controller).

the genius is, in my opinion, in that the affordances and fidelity of the simulation is such that controlling e.g. a flying flighter is fun and accessible.

do give this a go -- perhaps with your kids.

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).