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Daughter Moving on from Scratch…what’s next (lemmy.ca)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by Rhs519@lemmy.ca to c/programming

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Hello Everyone,

I’ve got a 10 year old daughter who loves making games in scratch, but she’s starting to run into that boundary where it stops working for you, and starts working against you.

She wants to make an adventure game in the vein of a trimmed down “legend of Zelda: link to the past”

I’ve looked at snap and gamefroot as potential next steps. Would consider a “true” language like JavaScript or python, but I’m worried she would be daunted if the ramp is too steep (maybe with the correct libraries/frameworks?) The immediate feedback and low ramp scratch offers are still important.

Anyone have any wisdom to share? Or point me to something I’ve missed?

Thanks

—- Update:

After some good discussion with my daughter, we’re going to try gamefroot (a proprietary, enhanced scratch) first.

She really wants to check out Gadot too.

Thanks everyone for the thoughtful comments and the help.

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[–] Towerism 10 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

I would recommend gamemaker.io. Although I haven’t used it in a long time, I think their philosophy is still the same. You get to use no-code to get your feet wet. When you need more flexibility you can use their custom scripting language. So you essentially get to become acquainted with their technology while programming in no-code and then when you switch to coding, it’s not as big of a leap since you’re not transitioning to a completely new technology.

[–] basidialtiger 2 points 1 year ago

Can second game maker. Last version I played around with was GM8, probably over a decade ago; It's got the benefit of OOP design forced by default and loose syntax requirements for GML when you do get there.

Other than extensibility, I don't recall much that GML couldn't do compared to a general high level language, at least with regards to games. Oh, and I do remember the Error reporting in it being fantastic, too.