We play with this at home before my 5 year old goes to bed.
I create little 2d scenes that we draw together on tuxpaint such as him going to school or riding a space rocket. It's good family fun. We used to do this with pygame, but I had to hand-craft a lot of the animation and scene building, and the code screen was a bit boring to look at for 15 minutes while I figure things out.
Sony's Dreams (https://www.playstation.com/en-us/games/dreams-ps4/) is absolutely worth looking at if you want to play with a game engine that children can use. It also incorporates the ability to remix anyone else's creation and automatically attributes the creator in your project.
They also bake in a pretty fascinating way to play those games inside of Dreams itself, making it a YouTube of video games.
Nice! I was wondering if would try something like this, but in the end, I takes me too long to create something entertaining even with a nice game-engine such as Unity.
So far I opted to play with Scratch Junior, as that
a) runs on my tablet
b) is simple enough for my kid to do most of the scene-building/programming herself :)
c) the block-language is simmilar to the one used with Lego Boost that we have as well :)
On the other hand, it is kinda limited, and we are only able to do simple point and clicks, so I might try Godot now, and see what can we make of it :)
You could also try normal Scratch now that it works on iPads in the web browser. Still limited compared to something like Godot, but it is more like a "real" programming language and would probably be a good stepping stone from Scratch Jr to something else.
That's pretty awesome, I really feel like I need to up my Dad game.
Do you mind sharing a game or screenshot so I can see what's possible?
My four year old is really struggling with the alphabet, I'd like to make a Shooter for him called "Destroy Z", where he would have to identify letters and then go kill them.
Godot's download size is pretty small, and there's a small demo included, along with a few other demos that are similarly pretty small files that you can download directly from the client, mostly MIT-licensed, including a first-person shooter demo, I think.
Grab some freely-licensed assets (there are a bunch of them, they're pretty easy to find with the obvious search queries, mostly CC-licensed), then the code for what you want should be pretty easy to hack up in a couple hours. GDScript, while not very elegant, is simple enough to where you should be able to learn it pretty quickly (it's aimed at non-technical people), and if you don't want to use it, you can use other languages, too.
Some of the ways it does things is a bit confusing, but if you keep docs and a search engine close-by, you'll figure it out; good luck, it's always nice to see parents who care so much!
I feel like there's room in the typing game genre for an easy mode meant to teach kids the alphabet.
Something like https://zty.pe/ or Type to Learn mashed up with Reader Rabbit.
I know there's a lot of disdain for them but I credit a lot of my early development to edutainment games. Difficult to pin down their actual effect of course.
