Hi All - I'd like to see if anyone can help me with a bit of advice slightly off the robot mainstream, but I'm srue there are plenty who can help me
I remember in my early days struggling with basic on my commodore 64 and what fun it gave me to finally produce a basic game - akin now to struggling with BASIC for the STAMP.
My 11 year old - who is brighter than me and with a higher geek reating has been nagging me to find him a way to program his own computer game - he's very keen and staggeringly quick on the uptake - He reads steven Hawking and does algebra for fun, so he's a bit unusual for an 11 year old!
SO my question - can someone advise what I should start him off with as and introduction ?? I got rid of the commodore years ago and we now run windows vista. Surely there must be some tutorials around he could follow - I'd back him against anything that's design for an average 16 year old, so It can't be too dummy.
I'd welcome a bit of advice on how I get him a quick start with something useful that delivers gratifying results reasonably fast. I'll have to learn with him I'm afraid as my skills lie in different directions!
Game Maker (from yo yo games). This is sorta psudo-programming but it still requires the same mind-set in terms of figuring out actual game-play and logic and “if-then” reasoning. You can build your game area, make sprites and objects and characters then you have to assign different atributes to these objects. You can affect gravity and player control as well as how everything will interact with everything else --i.e. not allowing your player to walk through a wall, and making an enemy disappear when hit. When you are ready, you can also see and manipute the actual code involved, but if that ends up being too advanced, you can simply stick with the drag-and-drop system. My 9-year-old has built some pretty amazing games with Game Maker. It is pretty popular as well, so there is almost always a YouTube tutorial for whatever you want to do when you get stuck.
I remember that it was much fun to program “Game of Live” in C++. I am sure it’s th same fun in any language since you can do this in pretty much any. Just start with the basics and then move to the next stage.
All you need to get started with (game) programming is a (modern) browser and maybe a text editor.
Just too see what’s possible, you can check out a version of angry birds based entirely on browser technologies: http://chrome.angrybirds.com/
If you go down this path your son will pick up a lot of skills that will be useful for years to come, the kind of skills people pay for.
The amount of tutorials and resources you will find online is staggering, just do a google search for “javascript game tutorial canvas” or “javascript game tutorial html5”. With the advent of webgl and canvas3d you can even make 3d shooters in your browser, however I would start with something simpler, like the game shown in this series of tutorials: http://www.canvasdemos.com/2009/07/09/game-development-tutorials/
