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A Little Kid Journey in Game Development

Introduction

This post is a duplicate of what my daughter wrote on her bearblog account here

I've been asked several times both offline and online on my daughter's journey in learning programming, so I've decided to ask her to write her story from a little kid's point of view throughout all the tools she has been using, how did she get to where she is now, etc.

I hope this might provide inspiration to parents with young kids on one of the methods that might work to get the children start learning programming. The key is they have to enjoy the process and make the learning process as if they are playing game instead of "learn coding". It's natural for kids to dislike learning (formal education) but they absolutely love playing game.

However you got to make sure the kids are not only playing any game, but strictly to only games that are educational. There are several tools and platforms that my kids uses and you'll see what I meant by this in the main article.

I've implemented this method on both my kids (10 and 7) and it looks to be going very well with both hooked on it and they would fill their spare time with productive activities: the small one (7yr old) is on MakerCode, Minecraft Edu, CodeCombat while the big one (10yr old) is now on Godot making her first commercial game.

So here is the main article:

Hi everyone, I'm Elysia and currently I am 10 years old. This is my journey in game dev...

My curiosity to game development all started when I saw people playing games. It makes me wonder, how do people create these amazing games? How do blocks of codes become a game? How to make something playable? I had a lot of questions back then.

Scratch

Until one day, I tried a Scratch trial from an advertisement in social media. But it wasn't fun. I was taught to create animations, not games. So, I stopped learning Scratch and went back to drawing (my favorite hobby).

A few months later, maybe 7 or so, I saw my dad was doing something using Python. I was interested and I asked him questions, he promised me to teach me programing after I am old enough, back then I was just around 5 years old.

That's where I started.

Minecraft Education

At the age of 6, I finally started programming. I started with Minecraft Education with block code. I finished a lot of lessons and missions using blocks. I tried the Python version instead of blocks, but it didn't feel fun after Minecraft Edu ran out of lessons for me to finish because it was only redoing the same lessons.

CodeCombat and Ozaria

When I was done with all Minecraft Edu free lessons, I then switched to CodeCombat. More challenging, complex, and fun. It also used Python.

CodeCombat was one of my favorites that time. Sadly, again I finished all the lessons and got bored. There were more lessons in the premium one, but I didn't think it's worth it. Ozaria was similar to CodeCombat and it got interesting story. I used the free version of both.

Teaching in Programming for Kids

After CodeCombat, my dad and I made a Programing for Kids class when I was on 2nd grade (I was around 7 year old). I taught my friends Minecraft Education and CodeCombat. There were a lot of my friends there and we were learning together for 3 months, until one day there were minimal number of participants in the class due to school exams. After that I decided to stop the class since I had done every lessons and missions available in CodeCombat and Ozaria, I got bored redoing them!

MicroStudio

I moved on and used MicroStudio. It used Lua. I actually quite liked the game engine, but the problem was there were lack of video tutorials. I couldn't make games without tutorials, because I was still a newbie. So, my dad advised me to try Roblox Studio.

Roblox Studio

Well, honestly using Roblox Studio was a pain...

There were A LOT of tutorials, but it is a 3D game engine (3D wasn't for my level yet); no 2D at all, and I got super annoyed I need to drag the game assets piece by piece, the default player skin being the same again and again, the same block variations, and sometimes accidentally dragging an object to the void and losing it forever!

Of course I was frustrated, the game engine wasn't the one I needed, it was a painful to use. Until I put my hands on Godot.

Godot

It was so amazing!! The game engine allowed us to spill our creativity into a game; it's also open source. Although Godot is a complex game engine, it'll feel easy as time passes.

The number of tutorials is plenty in Godot, I had lots of fun following them and I even got some of the finished project published on my itch.io page:

I enjoyed Godot so much that last year when I was 9 years old, I got the chance to do a presentation in front of almost 500 students, by then I was in the 4th grade. Here's my IG link if you want to see my presentation: IG link presentation

Oh yeah I put most of my devlogs in my IG channel though my dad told me to write more in this bearblog acccount.

Currently working on my first commercial game: Dungeon Survivor.

It's still in process and I have been working on it on my spare time for more than a year. My dad thinks it's 80% done already and I'm adding some "game juice" to make it more interesting to play. I'm excited to get it released so my friends can play the game.