I have a niece who wants to make a video game. I have 0 experience teaching and am very likely to recommend her some crazy complicated shit that will turn her off to the idea. She’s 8. Anyone have experience with this? Her first instinct was to try and make games in the Roblox engine but I know exactly how exploitative that shit is and how nontransferable those skills are

Libre software is a must

  • EmmaGoldman [she/her, comrade/them]
    ·
    3 years ago

    Alice is a game engine provided for free by Carnegie Mellon University & the National Science Foundation. I believe Oracle is also onboard since it's largely java-based. It's designed for middle school students to make games and have transferrable knowledge into Java, a pretty decent starting language. It's largely drag and drop in much the same way as Unreal or Unity can be these days, so that's definitely transferrable as well.

    I think Alice is one of the more satisfying game engines for kids to learn in, since it's 3d, has a large library of premade assets, and feels like you're actually doing it instead of just sort of telling it what to do and having it do it for you.