Hi. I want to get my little cousins into computers, and since they’re kids, making games are really fun for them. I made a game with them with Love2D and they had a blast (I put their faces on the characters) but I think Love2d is a bit too hard for them.
My main motive for them is to make something and be creative. Programming is just a tool for that.
So something simpler with less code and mental load that let’s them create stuff more simply is good.
What do you guys suggest?
Godot’s nodes do lots of stuff, but also nothing. They’re very modular, and from their tree structure and scene structure you can get away with not having to do a bunch of instantiation, which is nice. But they still only provide pieces of functionality, like animating some properties or detecting collisions, etc.
They’re handy, but they don’t contain any game logic in them, they’re just functionality. If you want to make a game, then you need to hook the collision detector to a function in the script for your node, and the function in the script needs to trigger a particular animation, etc.
The scripting language is similar to Python but different.
I like Godot, I think it’s a great visual editor for the visual stuff, but there’s definitely still programming in there. But it’s typically gentle programming, as much as it can be, with good editor integration and pretty good error messages and debugging, etc., in my experience.