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.

  •  ilidur   ( @ilidur@beehaw.org ) 
    4•1 year ago

    As a former Video Games Developer congrats on getting so far! The style of game she wants to make is very well suited to RPG Maker. This will be really good to get that Zelda itch scratched and may introduce her to some other Japanese franchises such as Final Fantasy.

    For general graphics programming I recommend Processing as it is easy to set up compared to Python based libraries, with lots of tutorias. But it won’t have anything that fits the definition of game (Maps, actors, etc).

    Godot has come a very long way and the tutorials are amazing so I definitely suggest not staying too long in the RPG Maker land, and instead pick up the 2D side of Godot.

    Edit: Just checked out gamefroot. Looks like a nice update to scratch so it seems like a good choice. After she reaches the limits of that I definitely recommend moving to something with text driving the code.