upbge VS AUXL

Starting with 2d games is very good advice however if the child is mostly interested in 3d, well not the most helpful advice.

Some people here forget that children are way more tolerant of not understanding things than adults are. They just want to get a quick taste not necessary dedicate their life to the study of game development.

I think something like RPG in a Box https://rpginabox.com/ is nice if the child likes Minecraft-style graphics. Also it is worth checking out if modding an existing games is something that might be of interest. Also blender is perfect, as it allows to focus on certain aspects on modeling first and in has an amazing game engine that can be solely driven by logic bricks: https://upbge.org/#/

Still, I think even something like Unreal should not be ruled out if the child is dead set on making a "real" game (9 years is a bit pushing it admittedly with help it might work out). For a visually-motivated child that has access to beefy computer, Unreal is the perfect tool to get things done early and fast. Load the starter template and they have a character they can walk around with in the first minute. Grab some free-for-the-month asset packs and they can make decent looking levels in a day or two that they can show friends and be proud of. And if they get to the point of needing logic, the visual scripting language is more than enough to make complete games in it.

Unreal is a monster of complexity but but perfect for just hacking together a quick asset-flip demo one can feel good about. They will learn about the realities of game dev soon enough, let them have some fun.

Also, if the child is the kind to need a more focused approach, blender is a nice choice

It's not as monolithic as you'd think. There are lots of engines out there but their communities aren't very vocal compared to Unity, Unreal, and especially Godot's community.

Take a look at: https://itch.io/game-development/engines/most-projects

And

https://www.gamedeveloper.com/blogs/the-generous-space-of-al...

If you look at both of these you'll see just how many engines there are and neither of these cover everything. There are plenty of engines popular in the Python community that no one outside of it are aware of. Such as Arcade [0], Python-Tcod [1], Ursina [2], UPBGE [3], and Panda3D [4]. But based on your description you'd really like https://gdevelop.io/. It embraces exactly what you're describing where you can build a game but just installing entire features others have made and put online into your game.

[0] Beginner friendly 2D library:

[1] Rougelike: https://python-tcod.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

[2] Beginner friendly 3D engine (built on Panda3D): https://www.ursinaengine.org/

[3] Blender Game Engine Fork: https://upbge.org/

[4] Highly flexible code first 3D engine: https://panda3d.org/

UPBGE which was formerly part of Blender is the only modern 3D engine I know of that supports Python for game development.

Otherwise, if it doesn't work, I'd suggest creating an issue at the UPBGE repository: https://github.com/upbge/upbge/issues

Yeah, they some people came back and revived it, they're adding some hella cool features like being able to render with eeve https://github.com/UPBGE/upbge

Link to issue:https://github.com/UPBGE/upbge/issues/1760

Another would be https://upbge.org/ 3D game engine forked from the old Blender Game Engine and deployed with Blender itself.

I tried a bunch of the popular game engines and none of them really clicked for me. It wasn't until I found A-Frame and Three.js (which isn't an engine at all, but a Web 3D XR VR AR Renderer) that had an Entity-Component Architecture with a foss eco system of components that you could mix and match then things started making more sense.

So did I cleverly use all these freely built components to make the greatest XR experience ever? Nah, I decided to re-invent the wheel and do everything myself :). I do enjoy the challenge and freedom to build my own ultimate tool though and I know it's not likely others will use it, but I did release it under GPL3 anyways. It has a wiki (slightly outdated atm :)), starter script and some examples too.

It's pretty fun as both a learning/practice experience and actually be able to use it for various builds. Makes it even easier to prototype XR ideas which I love. I am currently wrapping v0.3 which has added tons of improvements, although it's not exactly ready for release, if anyone feels like checking it out I added some links as ref...

AUXL (A-Frame UX Library) v0.3 repo --> https://github.com/Minty-Crisp/AUXL

Get started building your own AUXL XR experiences with the guide here --> (https://github.com/Minty-Crisp/AUXL/wiki/Getting-Started-with-AUXL)

View the repo here --> https://github.com/Minty-Crisp/AUXL

I'm actually working on an advanced engine for A-Frame which most likely is overkill for your current needs, but maybe in the future if you wanted more interaction, movement and scene features it may interest you. https://github.com/Minty-Crisp/AUXL

I myself hope to create lots and lots of interesting Web XR experiences using A-Frame specifically, so much so that I started creating my own foss A-Frame UX Library engine to make it easier to do so. It's called AUXL and you can check out the repo with a basic in-progress example here -> https://github.com/Minty-Crisp/AUXL . I am still fine tuning the basic v0.1 release with more testing and polishing, but plan on building out normal web site like scenarios as well as a mini Hidden Object Puzzler and Visual Novel experience to help stress test the system looking for improvements. A wiki will come later as well, but if you are interested in playing with it feel free to hit me up with any questions about it and I can help you get started.

I'm still polishing the initial version v0.1 and no wiki just yet, but if you have any questions hit me up or are interested in contributing I'd be happy for the assistance. https://github.com/Minty-Crisp/AUXL