DAD: It's going to be really really hard and you'll be banging your head against walls for hours trying to make something work"
GIRL: That's exactly what I want!
She described a pretty complex game to me, containing several minigames and a main story. Then she showed me some graphics that she's drawn on paper. Fortunately I got her to understand that she needs to start with something smaller first, before creating her masterpiece.
When she went to sleep, I started digging, knowing fully well that I'm not a game programmer and need to do some catching-up before I can help her in her endeavours. I downloaded Unity and made a good start of a Pong-like ball game. It was surprisingly fun and easy, so I guess we're gonna go on with Unity.
Today we did the first few clicks of the 2D Roguelike tutorial before it was bedtime. Fun times ahead!
I would like to see Scratch-like Editor layer build over Unity, so that the script component layer can be edited as Scratch-like mode and transpiled to C#/Javascript for Unity on fly. I think this possible with custom Editor scripts, someone just have to have time to do that.
ReplyDeleteI just have started to work with Scratch (and Snap!) with my 5yo girl, and have to say that Scratch as language is easy for her to follow, but the online tools and user interface for Scratch (and Snap!) are just awful; and not just for her, for me as well :)