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Comment by nurettin | Hacker News Reader

We play with this at home before my 5 year old goes to bed. I create little 2d scenes that we draw together on tuxpaint such as him going to school or riding a space rocket. It's good family fun. We used to do this with pygame, but I had to hand-craft a lot of the animation and scene building, and the code screen was a bit boring to look at for 15 minutes while I figure things out.

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Sony's Dreams (https://www.playstation.com/en-us/games/dreams-ps4/) is absolutely worth looking at if you want to play with a game engine that children can use. It also incorporates the ability to remix anyone else's creation and automatically attributes the creator in your project.

They also bake in a pretty fascinating way to play those games inside of Dreams itself, making it a YouTube of video games.

Nice! I was wondering if would try something like this, but in the end, I takes me too long to create something entertaining even with a nice game-engine such as Unity.

So far I opted to play with Scratch Junior, as that

a) runs on my tablet

b) is simple enough for my kid to do most of the scene-building/programming herself :)

c) the block-language is simmilar to the one used with Lego Boost that we have as well :)

On the other hand, it is kinda limited, and we are only able to do simple point and clicks, so I might try Godot now, and see what can we make of it :)

You could also try normal Scratch now that it works on iPads in the web browser. Still limited compared to something like Godot, but it is more like a "real" programming language and would probably be a good stepping stone from Scratch Jr to something else.

I think we try Scratch once she learns to read :-)

That's pretty awesome, I really feel like I need to up my Dad game.

Do you mind sharing a game or screenshot so I can see what's possible?

My four year old is really struggling with the alphabet, I'd like to make a Shooter for him called "Destroy Z", where he would have to identify letters and then go kill them.

This would be super easy and fun to do in Scratch. For sure someone has done a similar game you could borrow to start.

Also: don't worry about a 4YO struggling with letters. It's OK. But do make the game anyway.

Godot's download size is pretty small, and there's a small demo included, along with a few other demos that are similarly pretty small files that you can download directly from the client, mostly MIT-licensed, including a first-person shooter demo, I think.

Grab some freely-licensed assets (there are a bunch of them, they're pretty easy to find with the obvious search queries, mostly CC-licensed), then the code for what you want should be pretty easy to hack up in a couple hours. GDScript, while not very elegant, is simple enough to where you should be able to learn it pretty quickly (it's aimed at non-technical people), and if you don't want to use it, you can use other languages, too.

Some of the ways it does things is a bit confusing, but if you keep docs and a search engine close-by, you'll figure it out; good luck, it's always nice to see parents who care so much!

I feel like there's room in the typing game genre for an easy mode meant to teach kids the alphabet.

Something like https://zty.pe/ or Type to Learn mashed up with Reader Rabbit.

I know there's a lot of disdain for them but I credit a lot of my early development to edutainment games. Difficult to pin down their actual effect of course.

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