scratch-www VS stencyl-engine

I've always been fascinated by the technology. I spent many hors playing video games and the first dive into the world of development was when I had to code a game on Scratch. The excercise looked pretty easy: Create a Tamagotchi-like game. Let me tell you - It wasn't easy at all for someone of a young age! There were many things that I needed to pay attention to: Things I have never heard of before!

References: Scratch Blockly Google Teachable Machine LEGO Spike Prime

I would be surprised if your first program was C++? Specifically, getting a decent C++ toolchain that can produce a meaningful program is not a small thing?

I'm not sure where I feel about languages made for teaching and whatnot, yet; but I would be remiss if I didn't encourage my kids to use https://scratch.mit.edu/ for their early programming. I remember early computers would boot into a BASIC prompt and I could transcribe some programs to make screensavers and games. LOGO was not uncommon to explore fractals and general path finding ideas.

Even beyond games and screensavers, MS Access (or any similar offering, FoxPro, as an example) was easily more valuable for learning to program interfaces to data than I'm used to seeing from many lower level offerings. Our industries shunning of interface builders has done more to make it difficult to get kids programming than I think we admit.

A good place to start with kids that age is Scratch: https://scratch.mit.edu/

I think going straight to Switch would likely be a tall order. I’d start him off with something where he can be successful right away, writing something he can play on his own computer or share with friends easily.

Scratch[0] is often used to start kids out with programming. He may already use it in school, I know my nephew does, who is around the same age. I made a silly little game in Scratch about a year ago to share with my nephews[1], to try and inspire them a bit. The oldest one quickly went into the code and started tweaking the variables I had set to control things like speed and randomness to make it more chaotic. It’s a good way to learn the concepts of variables, loops, sprites, hit boxes, etc without getting bogged down with the complexity of syntax or a professional game engine. It’s also in the browser, so he can easily share with friends and have them play it, or fork it.

After that, maybe look to something like Godot[2]. It’s free and open source, so he doesn’t have to worry about licensing and all that nonsense that a 12 year old shouldn’t have to think about. I briefly looked and saw some videos of people running the Godot engine on the Switch, but I don’t know what’s involved in that.

I wouldn’t get too tied to a console when learning. Rumors of the Switch 2 are floating around, and who knows, that could mean a whole different path. Starting on the computer avoids this problem, and other huddles. Then if he likes the act of game dev and learning those things, he can cross the bridge to whatever the current console is, if that’s the direction he wants to head.

[0] https://scratch.mit.edu/

[1] https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/733627274/

[2] https://godotengine.org/

For anyone interested in working on visual programming professionally, we use it for creation in Rec Room in a system I built called Circuits https://blog.recroom.com/posts/2021/5/03/the-circuits-handbo...

It has a real place among novice programmers. We even have some experts who use it as a fun alternative to writing text. I don't see visual systems as an effective way to replace everything us experts are doing but they've gotten a ton of mileage in the jr. and learning domain. Scratch (https://scratch.mit.edu/) being another obvious example.

See the email in my profile if you are interested in roles and I'll see if we can find something that fits.

After some days, my sister, who was in class 2 then, came to me and showed me the first program she wrote. It was not a code-based program but a visual program using software called Scratch 3.0. It is similar to NODE-RED but with a different approach, focusing more on programming than wiring together hardware devices. It contains all the node blocks needed to build a simple program without any coding knowledge and is very user-friendly for children new to computer programming.

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

as for my 2D engine I am using Stencyl as it has a way to use blocks for programming and you could write out the code if you wanted to, it can create games that can be put in market places as well.

Stencyl is a really easy game engine to use. https://www.stencyl.com/ you can probably bang out a few quick games with it as you follow their tutorials.

Try Stencyl .

He used Stencyl

Stencyl! Build on Scratch but way more capable.

For an easy start in game developing, I would suggest to try GDevelop or Stencyl. Both are an easy option to start from 0. Once you get a grasp on programming logic and how to do some basic things, you can move to other engines if you want to do things in 3D.

Never heard of stencil.. but I have heard of stencyl. Maybe it is a variation of it?

If you're not the sociable type (you'll have to work on that because game making is first and foremost team work, but I understand it might be hard if you feel like you're not skilled enough), a lot of solutions exist to easily make your own games on your own, like Stencyl, or Adventure Game Studio. They'll barely require any technical knowledge, but if you really want to focus on writing, then you can even go with text-only tools such as Twine or Ink/Inky.