upbge VS love

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've built a few games with my son over the years. The fun part for us was all about fast iteration, and then laughing at the bugs together.

There are some other recommendations here for how to approach 3d, and he is specifically asking for 3d -- but I want to put in one more pitch for 2d: the fun-to-tedium ratio can be much higher.

I wonder if you could spend some time prototyping some of his ideas in LÖVE https://love2d.org/ -- if you show him the smallest sketch of something working, he might have an idea about what to add next.

Many years ago, on a flight, we went from 0 to game before we landed (with no experience).

* When a cell is born it randomly takes on the color of one of its (3) parents.

To try it out:

1. Install LÖVE for your device from https://love2d.org (~5MB and open source). (iOS requires building from source on a Mac, or installing the third-party Love2D Studio: https://love2d-studio.marknoteapp.com)

2. Install my Lua Carousel from https://akkartik.itch.io/carousel (~100KB). It includes all its source code and can be edited live on a computer as it runs.

3. Copy the ~100 lines of code from the bottom of https://akkartik.itch.io/carousel/devlog/651711/new-version-after-9-days and paste them into Lua Carousel.

Probably the most important piece of software we'll be playing around with is a game engine called LÖVE. Lua is well known around developer circles as being a good scripting language when it comes to making games, and this engine is one of the more popular. I'll be going through installation at the end of this post.

I got it – these are the steps I took:

1. Download Love from https://love2d.org/

libGDX is great, but I can understand if it's not for some people. This also applies to love2d, raylib and Monogame

You don't need to use git if you don't want to. Try downloading the 0.10.2 source directly here (the file you want is love-0.10.2-linux-src.tar.gz); I see you've tried this already but try again just to see what happens. Extract it to a directory (e.g. love-0.10.2-linux-src) and then run:

Love2d (MIT/C++/Lua) https://github.com/love2d/love

- Löve (doesn't have a separate page, but showcases a few games at the bottom of the page): https://love2d.org

The game, Wasp Escape, was built using the open-source Löve 2D game library for Lua.

love2d (lua) is a productive, fun, good docs, and most importantly proven / field-tested 2d game library, with easy to learn fast to compile and fast to run language - lua. while lua might not have a lot of features as python, the big bonus is that its much more focused language, which is important because otherwise you can get easily distracted on bells and whistles that other programming languages provide, i know that from experience