Creating games for beginners - where to start?

Question

Books

My 10-year-old son loves to play games, but lately he has been seriously thinking about learning how to create his own. In general, the task before me is quite difficult: to teach him both programming and creating games. I myself, at his age, started with BASIC, then switched to Assembler. Today, there are thousands of times more tools for development, there are game engines and frameworks - for example, the same Unity. Maybe you should choose Java / Android (and at the same time I would study it myself)?
I wanted to turn to those who have experience in game development: what platform is best to choose for learning and programming, and game development. And secondly: what literature would you recommend, taking into account the 10-year-old age of the student? He has no programming experience, but he quickly grasps everything.

Answer 1

You can start with pygame.

Answer 2

You can start with the basics of programming and geometry with algebra.
Still, if you immediately throw a person into the water, there is a chance that he will not swim, but drown.
And entering gradually and showing what and how - it will swim, although not so quickly. :)

Answer 3

For starters, HTML5 and JavaScript are better.
Using HTML5 and JavaScript, you can program games, develop applications for the Windows Store, create web applications (client and server. To implement the server part, you only need to learn Node.js).
Books:
JavaScript
HTML5
Making Isometric Social Real-Time Games with HTML5...

Answer 4

I've been teaching game development to an 11-year-old for a couple of months now. I started with Unity, but, as I understand now, it was not worth it.
I think it's best to start with a good editor for some game (we are currently working on the Starcraft 2 editor). This will immediately absorb important concepts that are otherwise difficult to explain (map, game world, game objects and their relationships), while the results can always be felt. In addition, there is no difficulty in finding models/graphics - the original game usually provides them in abundance.
But when there are few opportunities for triggers, you can already move on to programming. Maybe in the same editor, or maybe so that you don’t get used to bad things, and take the engine :)
So far, I haven't come up with anything in the literature. The working option is to follow the school curriculum of mathematics at a faster pace, to study physics. But, it seems to me that this is still a waste of energy and interest. It’s better to let him do what he can, and for now the teacher takes over mathematics / physics.

Answer 5

start with a heavy theory - drown his interest immediately. The principle should be like in sales - they created a small need and offered a solution. Knowledge without need takes root the worst of all and beats off the most important thing - interest.
Choose the language according to your goals. If you agree that in the future he can earn a living from this, then look at the analytics of the demand for programming languages ​​in the labor markets. Java is one of the pay leaders anyway, but I'm not sure if it's often used for games.

Answer 6

Unity3d is a great option to learn!
There are ready-made examples that you can change and get something new and see the result. And for children to see the result is very important, you understand that after spending a week on something you will get a result, and it is difficult for a child to wait and not see the result.
And what about English? If it's normal, then you can learn directly from the original lessons unity3d.com/learn/tutorials/modules, the pronunciation pleased me, it should be clear.
And if you look, you will find them (Unity3d) lessons about such simple things as a vector, a Cartesian coordinate system, operations on vectors and much more (which made me very happy at one time), that is, the beginning of understanding game building as such.

Answer 7

Buy a lego constructor with programmable modules. Perhaps robotics will interest him more.

Answer 8

That's the problem, that he is interested in both robotics and the creation of games for the computer. Well, that is not really a problem, it is very interesting and exciting - I see how his eyes burn from this. And we are currently assembling a robot with him - on Arduino.

Answer 9

When I was 10 years old, I loved to play and wanted to write my own game. So I MYSELF looked for pieces of code in books and other people's sources. There was no Internet then. He started writing in BASIC, mastered playing sound, deriving primitives and compositions from them, and later animation. I want to say that it doesn't matter what technologies, what matters is what interest he himself has in creating games.

Answer 10

We still decided to take Javascript + Pixi.js. Here's what we've got so far - slowly adding. Of course, I write, mostly me, but in the process I explain what is used for what.