make-real VS scratch-www

Consider using some seriously modern tech (LLMs!) to make games with point and click/draw.

https://github.com/tldraw/make-real

This is a really fun project that uses GPT4 and TLDraw. People have made games with it- it’s super WYSIWYG and you can draw the state machines as a diagram with boxes and arrows, the UI directly, etc. I would have loved to have this as a kid.

This is one of the reasons make-real works so surprisingly well: https://github.com/tldraw/make-real

PS: I got the idea from tldraw/make-real and abi/screenshot-to-code projects. So all credit to them 🙌

https://github.com/tldraw/make-real

Was posted some time ago on HN, it was a twitter link, can't find it anymore.

> Turn this into a single html file using tailwind.

https://github.com/tldraw/draw-a-ui/blob/8a889bf36afc06fbb0c...

Looks simple enough to run “privately” by screenshooting a normal tldraw canvas and passing the prompt with it to the API.

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).