Comment by Benjamin_Dobell | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Benjamin_Dobell | Hacker News Reader

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Benjamin_Dobell

This is a surprisingly crowded space. Aside from the big names like Scratch, Blockly, Roblox and (to an extent) Minecraft Education. There are heaps of projects out there created by educators who wanted to improve their own course. One particular example I was quite impressed with was Blockly -> Unity:

https://app.code-it-studio.de/course/step/4/44

I've worked in this space a lot: professional game development, led EdTech engineering departments, and worked as CTO of a company building a UGC interactive fiction platform. I've a six year old daughter who is really interested in creating — art, media, games, whatever. My personal opinion is that a lot of these platforms make a critical mistake. They all neglect that game design is hard!

Look at all the games that flop on Steam each year. These are made by professionals. It's disheartening for kids when the thing they've worked hard on simply isn't fun — particularly when they share it with friends and are met with, at best, a shrug.

Kids are going to be different, so it's still worth trying all the stuff that's already out there. However, I'm currently working on something in this space that's a bit different. Basically, removing the complexity of game design from the equation, but still allowing creativity, the ability to program functionality, build new mechanics and the ability for kids to share their work.

Of course, it's an interesting one, because kids most certainly say they "want to build games". It's just that kids, young kids in particular, don't understand what is actually involved in building the games that they love to play. The goal of what I'm building is very much to guide kids to graduate beyond the platform and ideally set kids up to make games from scratch — it's just not a good place to start.

> It's disheartening for kids when the thing they've worked hard on simply isn't fun — particularly when they share it with friends and are met with, at best, a shrug.

One of the best books I've read on this was "Board Game Design Advice: From the Best in the World" by Gabe Barrett of https://boardgamedesignlab.com/ (which is a great designer resource on its own). There's an audio version as well. What's good about the book is it's advice from pro (some very successful) game designers on how they handle failure and ideas that don't work. Until that point, I felt alone in my failures and discouragement. It really helped to hear it's a struggle for everyone.

>Look at all the games that flop on Steam each year. These are made by professionals. It's disheartening for kids when the thing they've worked hard on simply isn't fun — particularly when they share it with friends and are met with, at best, a shrug.

Why should this be a concern? Should people not paint for fun if their pictures aren't museum-worthy? Should they not play basketball just because they aren't NBA material? The point of doing something yourself is to do it, not to compete with professionals.

If the child is creating games because the act of creating games is fun, it's fine- great even! Same thing for painting, or playing basketball, etc.

The point I think GP was trying to make is, if the child is creating games because they want to share the games and they think other people will enjoy the games they created- that's where the problem is. GP is saying that kids can get disheartened because their expectation was others will enjoy their game, when potentially (very likely), others won't enjoy their game, because game design is hard. Adults may be more able to handle this emotionally and 'push through it', but children could potentially take this poorly and not want to continue game development because of the negative reactions of others.

We should absolutely continue to encourage game design (or really anything a child is interested in); I would say generally we should be aware of this potential concern for anyone developing games.

of course it's a concern because kids don't know that there's going to be a big gap between what they create and what they envision so it's disheartening for them

Well, I wrote games as a child in BASIC in the 1980s which weren't on the same level as the commercial assembly-language games. but I still enjoyed doing so.

That's why ideally game making is a collaborative activity -- if they make something with at least one other person, there's at least some communal appreciation for the effort.

Whatever you are currently working on sounds so interesting!

> > It's disheartening for kids when the thing they've worked hard on simply isn't fun — particularly when they share it with friends and are met with, at best, a shrug.

An easy way around this is to have kids include their friends as characters. Even if it's just a name and reasonable facsimile. And add some silly humor.

Yet another run and jump platformer game with a made-up character is going to be boring. A platformer where Billy from down the street farts jelly beans every time he jumps will probably get a few playthoughs and shares.

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