Hey #gamedev people:
My youngest (11) wants to develop games. He hasn’t had experience with this yet but he has played around a little with Scratch and Python and he has his own Ubuntu machine.
Does anyone have any recommendations for something he could get into?
@zigg I just started my nephew off with tic-80 and pico-8. If he’s comfortable with 2d games, with a retro vibe, those might be good.
The neat thing about those platforms is that there are plenty of existing games who’s source code is available for you to tweak. All games written in (a subset of) lua.
Alternately, I’ve read a lot of good things about building games in roblox. It’s got a lua based dev environment that looks to be pretty easy to pick up.
@Alamantus @zigg @ajroach42 I second TIC-80; wonderful project with a very friendly dev. I was just doing Game of Life on TIC-80 with my smols this morning and having a blast.
@ajroach42 @zigg I haven't found a way to run Roblox on Xubuntu, and I'd rather avoid Wine. I'm open to a VM running any Linux or BSD, if anyone knows Roblox-for-nix tricks!
@ajroach42 @zigg I read this http://roblox.wikia.com/wiki/ROBLOX_on_Linux as "has not worked on Linux since 2015, and then only in Wine." So, unlikely. I was hopeful, though! Not all tricks are documented!
@ajroach42 @zigg pico-8/tic-80 are great ideas for teaching kids! Lua is awesome, and helping kids get acquainted with a command line-like interface at an early age has always seemed like a cool idea.