My 11 year old son recently asked me to teach him how to program so he can write his own games. Unfortunately, the kind of game he has in mind is a first-person shooter which isn't exactly the easiest way to teach an 11 year old how to program.
We talked about different kinds of games we could write. He had no interest at all in text games like "20 questions" or "guess a number", so I told him about a game I wrote on my old 1802 computer back in the early 1980's. It was based on the Battlestar Galactica TV series that I was watching at the time. You would fly around a star field shooting at Cylon ships. Tyler thought that sounded fun so we started writing it in Smalltalk.
The video below shows our progress so far. I actually wrote most of it and I'm slowly explaining to him how it works. It's piqued his curiosity, however. So far, you can fly around and shoot at ships. The ships don't explode yet, but it still shows some good progress.
It looks pretty awesome, what dialect are you writing it in?
ReplyDeleteIt's VisualWorks 7.8
ReplyDeleteIs the code public would love to have a look and play with it.
ReplyDelete