Is it possible for a kid to develop games ? I mean not the computer wizkid, but the average one who is simply fond of playing computer games ??
Look into scratch (the programming tool), it’s amazing to start with
Yeah you gotta be careful with this one though. I started using this at age 11 and now I have to sit through sprint planning meetings and discuss velocity of Jira board tickets.
It is really good though. Learning this as a kid and then into more serious game dev tools as I grew experience has led to a computer science degree and a “mostly” enjoyable software development career.
It could be worse, you could have to sit through those meetings AND not be a developer 😅
But yeah, they are boring if not properly done (and I’ve seen them done properly once).
I was teaching myself assembly language and C when I was in 7th grade, so sure. If a kid is self-motivated enough then the sky is the limit.
Kids are capable of some amazing things if given the right tools, enough time and plenty of positive reinforcement.
An underrated place to start is with Doom modding. The various ports of Doom engines have grown to have surprizingly rich feature sets these days, and a lot of indie games have been getting made in these engines. It’s easy to get into because you can get started pretty much right away by making mods for existing games.
So for example, you could download the free game FreeDoom, get the UZDoom engine to play it on, the map maker Ultimate Doom Builder to make maps for FreeDoom, SLADE for the other aspects of editing, and then finally the ZDoom wiki should be able to point you toward everything you’ll want to learn to be able to make whatever you’d like.
So you can start learning and producing content very quickly by making maps, learn and develop those maps into more extensive mods, eventually learn and develop those mods so far they become “total conversions” - meaning that it’s still technically a mod, and still would depend on the Freedoom game you’re building on, but has grown extensively enough to replace all assets; and then finally it is possible to convert that total conversion into a full fledged standalone game.
And of course once you have enough experience with this, you can develop standalone games right from the start of a project.
When I was in highschool, I did a course on games that used this:
It was free, very simple to learn, and reasonably powerful, you could build 3D games similar to the first Doom with some effort.
After that, Unity would probably be the next step up?So yes, a kid can definitely create games with a small amount of effort.
GameMaker is a great place to start!
Also I find godot’s syntax + built in editor easier to work with than unity’s c# and having the entire engine up and running in ~10s would remove a lot of friction for someone learning
