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Show HN: my 4-y-o son drew a video game. He drew then we hacked together.

audenneedham.com

247 pointsmneedham64 comments

Very nice!

A little tip: preload all your images so that they don't get downloaded as you perform the different moves, that caused the characters to disappear briefly for me. Doing so is as simple as creating an Image object and setting its src:

    var preload = new Image();
    preload.src = "/path/to/image.png"

Top tip! Thank you - will add this and some easter eggs when I get home tonight.

I have been having what appears to be sex with the dinosaur for like 10 minutes now and it is still not dead.

Me too, that is one mean-ass dinosaur. Don't mess with the T-Rex spawned from the untamed imagination of a four year old.

You're doing it wrong! (SCNR :)

A while back I got my niece started with DS Game Maker - so she could make her own games for the Nintendo DS. I just got back from my sister's house and she showed me the progress she has made and it's amazing that after 9 months she hasn't lost interest and is still building her game.

Good job and keep your son interested in building his own world and making the computer do what he wants - and he will be smarter for it.

Not that I care about the karma - but would appreciate hearing how this post didn't contribute?

I have a four year old, and a five year old. My four year old is getting to be a master at Angry Birds, my five year old has no interest. I would be VERY interested in a write-up on how you went about this with your child. Step by step...starting at the piece of paper that had the drawings, to how you turned it into this end result. I don't care if the game has bugs or not...the concepts would be fascinating to know and I would love to see if my four year old could do it. I would even be willing to pay a small price for a guide like this.

Seconded! Writing this out as a guide would be great, e.g. you can do an iPad app where the drawing would be done on the device, too.

Wouldn't take anything quite so extensive - I'll do it here! I accidentally let my son play through all of Shadow of the Colossus with me, much to my wife's chagrin. He loved it.

This past weekend he said, "Dad, let's play Shadow of the Colossus!" I said, "No." He paused for a moment and said, "Dad... how do video games work?" I paused for a moment and said, "You know what? Let's make one!"

So we sat down at the computer together, did some quick research on available simple JS game engines (I was hoping for something easy and HTML5 but nothing surfaced...) and decided on the type of game to make. After that we had some conversations about gameplay mechanics and characters. We talked around characters for a bit and he sketched out some ideas. Mr. Muscle and Crocodilehead were born.

I picked apart the (horrible compressed JS) code a little bit to figure out how the game worked and then we looked through sprites together. After identifying the various sprites he set to work, drawing base sprites (about 10 of them for Mr. Muscles and four for Crocodilehead) and a background image.

While he slept that night, I scanned in all of his sprites and started resizing/animating them.

He critiqued my work in the morning suggesting the Crocodilehead should not puke blood on people when attacking (you can still see a bit of the residue in the game now) and that Mr. Muscles should not shoot fire out of his hands when doing the megapunch.

After that it was mostly just tweaking and farting around in photoshop.

He got a good look at the code this time around and has a pretty solid base understanding of the relationship between files, images, servers and browsers thanks to a web page we built together a few months ago: http://audenneedham.com/volcanoes/ (he wireframed that one, wrote the content, selected and helped to resize the images, did the Wikipedia searches for pages to link to and helped to edit the HTML...)

Nothing too hairy for a 4-y-o:

1) identify interest (which it sounds like you have)

2) find a platform (a friend recommended http://gamequery.onaluf.org/ for our next attempt)

3) brainstorm

4) draw

5) fiddle

And for further reference, I'm not a developer. We didn't do anything significant in the code - mostly just reverse-engineering and tweaking.

Thanks for the response. re: "...wrote the content, ...., did the wikipedia searches...." --> my 4YO can't read or write! Damn HN, I always feel inadequate!

Not all four-year-olds are interested in reading and writing. That has nothing to do with your personal adequacy. Furthermore, it only has a minimal amount to do with their ultimate adequacy at reading and writing. Different kids learn things at different times.

I have 4 kids and they vary in the age at which they could read from 3.5 to 8.5.

No reason to feel inadequate. All kids are different, and they are not extensions of our egos. As a first-time parent, I am still trying to convince myself of this, but I am slowly beginning to believe it.

I was a very articulate 3 year old (I spent most of my time with much older children), but I turned out to be somewhat average when I started school (in the case of motor skills far below average), to the surprise of my parents, who thought I was a "genius" because I could parrot off huge amounts of random trivia, and tell engaging stories. My parents even had my IQ tested, and it wasn't particularly high overall. I still retain my trivia talent, but in the era of Google, whatever little value it once had is rapidly becoming worthless.

My 2.5 year old son is fairly quiet (but doesn't have any language issues - he says plenty, he is just cautious). My in-laws have the nasty habit of comparing him to his cousin who is the same age and is a great talker (her father is a used-car salesman, so that's not much of a surprise). I used to get very defensive, and point out the stuff he knows, and can do. Now I just let it wash over me.

A lot also has to do with environment. My son didn't know colors, shapes, alphabets, numbers and puzzles. I got an iPad, and he managed to learn these very quickly. My wife is a bit detached and unmotivated, so this was a stroke of luck. Would waiting a year or two till he started school have made a difference to him learning that stuff? I doubt it.

If your 9 year old can't read, I guess that's a problem. If your 4 year old can't read, who cares?

Shit, sorry! Wasn't my intent at all. Kids learn different things at different times and we've played to Auden's strengths in these areas. We push hard when there's obvious interest in anything specific.

Don't want to give the impression that he's spelling well or writing quickly :)

Our 2-y-o is an entirely different person with much much different development patterns.

I'm wondering if you're from a different species.

My elder son is 6 and can't read, draw, or, God forbid, understand "the relationship between files, images, servers and browsers".

He's far from stupid; he plays chess, and Angry Birds, and many other games. But this? At 4??

That is some wanky gameplay. I think your son is paying you too much.

Do you have a soul at all?

I think your sarcasm detector is broken.

Cool! I did a forward jump then started kicking. I levitated in mid air able to kick indefinitely. I have never felt closer to the Matrix than that moment. :) Great work!

Would be pretty cool if a kid could draw this stuff with this fingers on iPad and have it turned into a real video game. I bet kids would love this! "Draw your hero here." "Draw your monster here."

I agree. It's something steve jobs would probably loved to have on the iPad and it would be a prime example of using technology to inspire the imagination.

Isn't that what Drawn To Life is all about? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drawn_to_Life

Try this- http://www.drawastickman.com/

That's really neat... it would make the basis of a great ipad game.

It is already available at http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/draw-a-stickman/id467614894?m.... Unless you meant something more complex with additional levels?

I'm playing this while my 6 week old son is asleep and strapped to my chest.

I can't wait to share with him the joy of programming.

But I sometimes worry that today's technology has come too far to be used as a stepping stone to teach kids. I remember as a kid messing around with a Commodore-64, then moving on to Q-Basic. These were not only the technologies of the time, but perfect for a child to pick up.

Maybe I'm underestimating the little guys. :)

My 9 year old brother picked up Python, no problem, from scratch. Kids are learning Javascript in 7th grade Web classes in my hometown's school district. I think they'll be okay!

Really cool. Teaching kids early is very important. Cool initiative in Ireland to teach young kids programming early, http://coderdojo.com.

There is a business in this. My six year old would be all over it. Let customers upload the images (sprites, background) from their kids' drawings.

I think this is great father son time. I wish I could get my little one interested in programming. I can't hold his concentration long enough. He is very interested in video games but I think 99% of that revolves around mario and I don't think anything short of a 3d mario would keep him interested!

I will not critique the game, I think it's flaws and all are a great result of some good bonding time

Hi there!

It's great to see someone so young who is getting into game design. We have some software called Construct 2 which is aimed at non programmers and as a time saving device, you can see it at http://www.scirra.com (a quick video of how it works at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5RlSmkSbleI). You and your son might really enjoy using it! (Also exports to HTML5 games)

I'm not aware of us having any users as young as 4 years old, but we would love to hear if he enjoys using it and can make games in it!

I'm happy to give you a free license for it in return for some feedback if you want, don't worry if not :) Just send me an email if you want it.

Tom

Total rip of the Reptyl stage of Silver Surfer (NES). Don't be surprised when you get sued.

Super cool.

I had been thinking if I really need to buy a domain now for my kid (or conserve cash now as I bootstrap my startup).

You just inspired me to buy a domain for my 2 yr old so I can do similar things when he is old enough. Done!

Thank you! :)

Awesome jobs! Found a few bugs:

If you jump, then jump again, you land level to where you jumped the second time (I suspect you have the character descend by C pixels, instead of back to X,Y coordinate)

I can walk past the dinosaur, and then I can face him, but if I punch or kick it turns me back around.

If I walk past the dinosaur, it can still hit me, even though it visually misses.

Very nice, and good job involving your son in coding that way–that's an awesome way to start!

Wow good for you guys. Now I feel bad; my 7-year-old daughter was doing great with Scratch but the power supply on the ancient laptop I had given her went bad and I haven't replaced. Guess I need to start looking around for another.

Great idea and execution. From my perspective the point isn't how great the programmin is, but that you got your son to view himself as a creator, and to recognize that he can make things! Awesome father-son idea!

This is great! I think there are some problems with the gameplay though. I was able to walk way past the dinosaur, but every time it attacked, I would start bleeding even though I was nowhere near it.

Is that a domain name for your son in the future? I love the idea.

Yes, bought domains for both of my kids as soon as we decided on names. Figure they're useful as sandboxes for things like this and I'll turn over the keys when they want them.

This is very cool. Would you consider sharing the code so I could teach my 13 year old? He is pretty good with HTML, but really wants JavaScript. My E-Mail is in my profile

There's a link to the download page for the engine just underneath the game. The rest is just some images, a few JS files and one CSS file: http://audenneedham.com/game/index.html http://audenneedham.com/game/ENGINE/game-min.js http://audenneedham.com/game/ENGINE/controls-min.js http://audenneedham.com/game/ENGINE/engine-min.css

A friend recommended trying gameQuery out next time - looks a little tidier - the one I used was all compressed JS and kind of ugly to work in: http://gamequery.onaluf.org/

Very cool! If you add peerbind to it, it can be multi-machine. I wrote peerbind - and I added it to a game my boys built too. No more fighting over keyboard space. ;)

I actually did something similar, had my kids drawing sprites for a javascript/css game, but we did a shoot-em-up. Great fun!

I realized I can't play on my android phone because keyboard doesn't show up. Is there any work around?

If you happen to use CyanogenMod, you can go to Settings->CyanogenMod Settings->Input and set it so a long press to either the home or menu buttons launches the soft keyboard.

Am I a robot?

'Mr. Muscles' - you're fighting Crocodilehead.

Is it just me or does it not work at all in Firefox? My keyboard inputs don't have any effect.

Works in Firefox 7.0.1 for me

ditto, FF7 on Kubuntu.

This is amazing! I hope to be able to do things like this with my son once he is old enough.

You're an incredible father. I know he'll remember this forever.

Love this. I think I might do something like this with my son.

Game doesn't work for me in Firefox.

I know the internet discourages "me too" responses, but...

This is awesome. Thanks for sharing it.

This game sucks. I don't know why you want credit for it.

Could you elaborate on why you feel this way with some constructive criticism? All I see is a father who made something cool to teach his kid some fun things. Maybe you can't understand because your father never loved you enough to do the same?

I hope this kid grows up to be your boss.

edit: could

I just presumed he was joking. The game is very obviously amazing.
I hope my kid grows up to be his own boss ;)

> This game sucks.
tedjdziuba stated his/her opinion. It doesn't make it worse one because it isn't the appraisal of the game, like seen in most of the comments. Different tastes here and that's all. And that's fine too. De gustibus non est disputandum.
> Maybe you can't understand because your father never loved you enough to do the same?
Yet you go ad hominem, and what makes it really worse, regarding his/her family. Despicable behavior.

Hilarious!
T.

That is awesome!!

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