Hacker News Reader

Comment by grenoire | Hacker News Reader

I wish I had such tools when I was growing up building games! I had to battle ncurses, Allegro, OpenGL, and many more lower-level tech just to get some basic I/O. I'm not too sad about it because it paved the way to my stronger understanding of computer technologies, but at the same time it took me way longer to build playable games.

I think this is a step before making Minecraft mods or Roblox games, but definitely a welcome one for the coming generation of creative kids.

View on HN

Amos on the Amiga was pretty great. I was able to get sprites moving around, respond to mouse clicks, even some simple 3D with an extension. Admittedly never actually made a playable game, as my programming chops weren't good enough yet. There was a small community making games with it, and they would be distributed among other shareware.

Last week I found my old floppy disks for the STOS (AMOS equivalent for the Atari ST) I never managed to build a real game with it at the time although I had created some on the Amstrad CPC 6128 before. If we had had the internet back then, it would have made such a difference to be able to connect to those communities !

As an adult at the time I made a game with AMOS (Mouse Impossible) and it was published free as a magazine cover disk. I was prouder of that than anything I did at work!

That's something I encounter a lot too when wondering what tool to propose kids to start programming.

I had GW-BASIC. It took two lines to draw a line on the screen. There are not a lot of things as easy nowadays

I was looking for a GW-BASIC comment.. "back in my days". Glad to see you wrote one, otherwise I would have to!

Python implementation of logo turtle graphics in the standard library:

https://docs.python.org/3/library/turtle.html

Isn't a terrible option for that sort of thing.

Logo is great in whichever form. And great for kids as well, the concepts are very easy to grasp at a young age

Hahaha. I had a z80 processor and 16kb. I wish I had OpenGL.

For a 8-9 year old OpenGl is too much. I started with z80 too and was making crappy games but it was fun. All these simplistic game making frameworks are a great resource for young people and the simplicity is welcome even at more advanced levels. Sometimes you just want to be at high level and concentrate on the whats of the game not the hows.

There was Click and Create, I recall having some fun with that back in the day, with very little coding (none really)

I used click and create and others by clickteam very heavily growing up. Paved the way for making games very heavily for me.

Wish that methodology was still around, you could do a lot with it.

It is still around, although basically only from Clickteam still. You can get Clickteam Fusion: https://www.clickteam.com

I think Construct is similar: https://www.scirra.com/

Reply on news.ycombinator.com