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So my son is interested in all things computer game related.

Loves to play. Loves to build in game worlds. Loves to think about improvements. Loves to think about designing his own game.

He is 12...but pretty darn savvy.

So are there recommendations on what kind of...programs/etc I could get him (free or low cost being the best) to help him get started in truly creating playable games?

We got Garry's Mod the other day...and he is head over heels for it. But of course...downloading and using stuff created by others isn't quite the same as making your own things.

I saw something about Amazon's "Lumberyard" the other day...sounded interesting.

Thanks for the thoughts!

Never too early to help your kids to realize and reach their dreams

Put him into STEM courses. Electives should be more STEM. That is how you become a programmer. That is how you get to programming games.

Seriously, though. Screw games. Have your child become a regular programmer and that'll give him money to buy all those games as well as have the best rig in the neighborhood.

Yeah.....unless he gets into a studio(Which is actually really hard) its likely he could end up as a small starving developer.
But in all honesty, he is 12, he is likely gonna change his mind, when I was 12, I wanted to be part of the ASPCA

I second the STEM courses, especially math. He's gonna need a lot of math.

Also, as mentioned games aren't the best choice if you want to make money. There are tons of talented programmers wanting to make games, but very few make money.

Yep, it's one of those things where people do it more for themselves than for money (if you want to make money with computers, look at securities). Although that's not to try and dissuade, happiness is more important than money in my book.

I know that there has already been some talk about STEAM (including Arts), but it is something to keep in mind that can be helpful for game design as well.

Start saving for college, STEM courses set the course now. High math skills. Also have him analyze the games he plays, see how he understands what makes a game good, bad, balanced, unbalanced.

Also play board games with him, identify the balance or lack of balance with him, identify where the game has a break point or if it doesn't.

There are game design programs at several universities. MIT, Stanford, etc. The university near where I live was rated as one of the top 8 game design programs in the country. It's also probably less expensive and easier to get in than some others.

Game theory however is important, but is also a bit dry for my taste.

Shawnee State University, look it up and see what they have to offer.

IIRC, there is a high mucky-muck in one of the big companies that is an alumni and every year he gives a seminar there. I haven't been, always find out too late.

 d-usa wrote:
I know that there has already been some talk about STEAM (including Arts), but it is something to keep in mind that can be helpful for game design as well.

Especially if you can get 3d design, people who can code and make models/textures are going to find getting a job easier than someone who can do just one.


Edit: Also, big thing, watch out for predatory, for-profit colleges.

Guys, the kid is 12. There's no point talking about college courses or whether this will make him the right amount of money.

This is the age where you help the kid by helping him along with some stuff to play with. Encourage him to mod existing games. Give him access to some programming packages, and let him come up with stuff on his own.

If the passion lasts and he sticks at it he’ll develop extraordinary skills very quickly. If that happens then you start looking at whether it’s worth chasing in college.

However, not knowing what the best programs are for someone looking to learn some game design, I admit I’m entirely useless to you, TheMeanDM

You should look into Sploder or Stencyl.

Also, as D-USA mentioned, STEAM vs STEM - every video game needs artists and writers, it's not just coding and modelling.

 Co'tor Shas wrote:
Also, big thing, watch out for predatory, for-profit colleges.

Yes, this.

A friend of mine went to a for-profit college for game design and walked away about $100k in debt and later learned his degree was worthless because the school wasn't accredited. He should have done his homework researching the college, but hindsight and all that.

For-Profit College?
You mean like every college this day.
But yeah, I will echo, see if he will like it later on.
Most game designers that are actually making games are going the independent route. If your working on a big AAA game, your arent making games, your making part of a small game that you arent really a part of.

 sebster wrote:
Guys, the kid is 12. There's no point talking about college courses or whether this will make him the right amount of money.

That's a really good point.

This is the age where you help the kid by helping him along with some stuff to play with. Encourage him to mod existing games. Give him access to some programming packages, and let him come up with stuff on his own.

If the passion lasts and he sticks at it he’ll develop extraordinary skills very quickly. If that happens then you start looking at whether it’s worth chasing in college.

However, not knowing what the best programs are for someone looking to learn some game design, I admit I’m entirely useless to you, TheMeanDM

Something interesting to note is that some of the big developers(I know BioWare and DICE/EA at least) do hands on workshops with kids around the age mentioned to let kids see what goes into making a game as part of a team. BioWare's program is three or four weeks long and more like a summer camp than anything else, but it's at least good exposure to the basics of what a game developer does.
I just contacted a friend about this and found out they no longer run them as their own program. Their developers/designers instead do it as volunteer work with local summer camps devoted to computer sciences.

Use this:
https://unity3d.com/

Is it free?
There is a free version and a Pro version. If you make 100 000$/year selling video games, you MUST use the PRO version. Also, there is a store to buy video game component; is is possible to use only free stuff and build cool little games. This is what I did.

Is it hard?
I dont know, what is hard? is surfing hard? Creating a game do require a lot of work.
There is plenty of tutorial where, step by steps, a complete game will be created:
https://unity3d.com/learn/tutorials
It is important to start with a tutorial.

Is it "the real thing"? can I make a real video game?
Yes

What games were made with this?
https://unity3d.com/showcase/gallery


Go for it.

note: I'm a software dev. and I do little video game for my son to play with.

I started out with a program called the Games Factory. I think it's a really good introduction to programming, as it lets you build games without any programming experience, by interactively directing your game as you play it. For example, you can draw a little character (or choose one from the GF library) and place him on the screen, then you click play and your game starts. So now you press an arrow key and the game will pop up a windows saying "you have pressed right arrow" and then it will ask you what you want to happen when you press the right arrow, so then you can choose your character and go through and say you want to move him 3 pixels to the right. If he collides with another character, or walks off the edge of the screen, again it will pop up and ask you what you want to do. I think it's a really good way of teaching children how computers think: they are stupid and require very precise instructions or they'll do something unexpected. After a while you'll get a feel for it, and you can start editing your instructions, and before long you'll find it's easy to just write your own instructions without waiting for the computer to ask you. The program was surprisingly powerful, and I was able to build all sorts of stuff in it.

When I went to college to learn Flash and Shockwave, I found that all the scripting was basically the same principles I'd learned from The Games Factory. After that I taught myself Java (which is also very much the same), and I started reading about programming principles, such as polymorphism, MVC, functional programming etc... Many programming languages have common elements and work along similar principles, so once you know one it's fairy easy to transfer that knowledge to another.

I don't know if The Games Factory is still available, but the makers Click Team seem to have brought out a Games Factory 2. I'm afraid I haven't personally tried the Games Factory 2, but if it's anything like the first one, then I would say it's a excellent program for your son to get started with games and programming.

You can get it here http://www.clickteam.com/the-games-factory-2

EDIT found a video, it looks very similar:

Programming, Design, Art are all very separate, very different things. If the kid's just looking to put together some stuff on the computer that he can say he made and show to his friends for a good lark nothing wrong with what he's doing now.

If he's really looking to design, as in come up with rules and systems to facilitate play it's probably easier to start on paper than it is going straight for actual video games. All that programming, art, music, etc.. are just huge amounts of overhead to get past before you can get at actual design. It's still directly applicable to video games when you have an easier means to get past that overhead, for example X-COM was designed on paper/tabletop first.

If he's looking to program or do art, other folks have already covered that pretty well.

 Chongara wrote:
for example X-COM was designed on paper/tabletop first.

As a very quick side note, it's kind of funny. I was looking at some screenshots from the original X-Com, which was interesting to me since I enjoyed the 2 recent ones. It's pretty obvious from the original screens that it was done on paper, and more interestingly, the fundamental gameplay and mechanics seem to have changed very, very little - just fluff and graphical upgrades.

Having gone down this same route I can tell you that it requires a ton of work and dedication and you still have only a small chance at even getting in the industry. Even IF you can get in the industry it is not as much fun as it sounds, long hours, crunch times, burnout, buyouts, relocations are something that you have to deal with every project.

IF you want to even think about colleges, avoid anything that is a state school. You want colleges that have staff that have been in the industry who have the experience and know what they are talking about. Colleges like Full Sail or UAT.

Now, lets get back to the basics. You are starting with a 12yr old and trying to get them started in coding now is going to really confuse them. I didn't start learning programming until high school so there is time. However writing and art classes would be a good start, I went to college for level design and I still had to take art classes, writing classes and figure drawing classes on top of all of my game design and 3D modeling classes.

My parents tried the same thing too, they gave me book after book on how to "Make Games" that went into coding and art and all of that, the books would have been great if I had been making games for the NES or SNES but not dealing with what was coming out circa 2003. Industry technology is constantly changing and evolving it is better to work on the basics.

I wouldn't look into modding right now as most mod tools are pretty advanced requiring you to know how to make textures and how to code. I would look at games that are out now that allow you to make things within game worlds. Games like Scrap Mechanic, Space Engineers, Besiege. Super Mario Maker would be an excellent starting point for level and game design as would Minecraft. Minecraft is still very popular and I imagine there are tutorials on modding for it out there.

For those of you not familiar with crunch time as it pertains to the video game development industry, read up.

You probably want to start them out with really basic programming logic concepts.

Such as:
-variables
-conditional logics (if...then, boolean, )
-looping logics (do while...)
-subroutines
-coding designs (sequential vs Object Oriented Programming vs etc...)

Essentially, the foundational programming logics that used by all languages.

Then, pick a language, and build a "Hello World!"

I really like this resource:
http://holowczak.com/programming-concepts-tutorial-programmers/

Then, explore the various programming tools out there!

 Ouze wrote:
For those of you not familiar with crunch time as it pertains to the video game development industry, read up.

The "Tales from the Trenches" are also good, though more oriented at QA than design. There's a lot about terrible bosses and working conditions but you also get some stories about people who really enjoyed their work and had a lot of fun.

Then got laid off

http://trenchescomic.com/

Peoples personal stories are at the bottom, below the comic strip.

i also thought of some more games that would be good starting points for wanting to get into game design.

Neverwinter Nights (the original & expansion NOT NWN2 - this takes your 4ed D&D and sticks it into video game format. I actually fiddled with the development kit on my spare time and there used to be some pretty good guides on how to do everything from basic world building and item placement all the way up to scripted events.

This is really good for starting your ideas on pen and paper (level design, story, items & monsters) and then actually making it in a game that you can play.

Warcraft 3: The Frozen Throne was a game we actually modded in one of my game design courses. Even though the game is an RTS with custom maps you can easily make very different custom maps. Warcraft 3 is where DoTA got it's popularity and tower defense was all the rage.

I would also subscribe to www.gamasutra.com which is the free online version of Game Developer Magazine. This is a wealth of information about industry trends, post-mortems of new and old games, what games got right, what games got wrong, job postings and information on conferences like E3, PAX and GDC.

I'll go against the grain and recommend Twine, as it's pretty simple and free.

It's more for making 'choose your own adventure' type stuff though, but it's a good place to start thinking about pacing and story flow.

Scratch is supposed to be The Big up and coming thing now, isn't it?

Also, have a look at what Sir Ian Livingstone (as in, the founder of Games Workshop) has to say on various topics. - His comments might be a little too United Kingdom focused but they should be of interest.

 Ouze wrote:

 Chongara wrote:
for example X-COM was designed on paper/tabletop first.

As a very quick side note, it's kind of funny. I was looking at some screenshots from the original X-Com, which was interesting to me since I enjoyed the 2 recent ones. It's pretty obvious from the original screens that it was done on paper, and more interestingly, the fundamental gameplay and mechanics seem to have changed very, very little - just fluff and graphical upgrades.

That’s interesting, because the current X-Com has a very clear pen and paper style shooting mechanic. Modifiers are direct adjustments to your % to hit, and damage is pips taken off total health. It’d work in pen and paper with a D100 and be fine.

The original X-Com though, well there was a whole mess of mechanics in the background. It gave you a % to hit based on your accuracy, weapon, health and stamina, but that wasn’t actually your % to hit. That number just give you a column on a table, which then used a random number generator to tell you how many degrees of accuracy your shot had – how much it deviated per tile from the shooter to the target. Then if the shot didn’t deviate too much and hit the target, you had all sorts of tables based on weapon damage to tell you how much health you lost, how much was degraded, and whether you took a specific critical injury. Pretty much unplayable as a table top game.

So it’s interesting to hear that the first game was created as a table top game.

Bit off topic, sorry about that.

What does he actually want to do?

Storyboarding the game is totally different from the graphics design which is totally different from the logic part. There's no point trying to be a jack-of-all trades unless you want to work somewhere small.

The programming side is almost all math these days, probabilities, statistics and trigonometry.

That said; focus on stuff that helps him with math and logic, as well as screwing about with some graphic design projects. It should be easy enough to make basic phone games using Unity, or even web-based games, then see what he likes most there.

I personally wouldn't recommend it - making games is nothing like playing games, tends to have pretty crap conditions and pay, and is likely to get outsourced to India at the drop of a hat.

I'm going to push mine towards a trade of some sort, like joinery.

 sebster wrote:

 Ouze wrote:

 Chongara wrote:
for example X-COM was designed on paper/tabletop first.

As a very quick side note, it's kind of funny. I was looking at some screenshots from the original X-Com, which was interesting to me since I enjoyed the 2 recent ones. It's pretty obvious from the original screens that it was done on paper, and more interestingly, the fundamental gameplay and mechanics seem to have changed very, very little - just fluff and graphical upgrades.

That’s interesting, because the current X-Com has a very clear pen and paper style shooting mechanic. Modifiers are direct adjustments to your % to hit, and damage is pips taken off total health. It’d work in pen and paper with a D100 and be fine.

The original X-Com though, well there was a whole mess of mechanics in the background. It gave you a % to hit based on your accuracy, weapon, health and stamina, but that wasn’t actually your % to hit. That number just give you a column on a table, which then used a random number generator to tell you how many degrees of accuracy your shot had – how much it deviated per tile from the shooter to the target. Then if the shot didn’t deviate too much and hit the target, you had all sorts of tables based on weapon damage to tell you how much health you lost, how much was degraded, and whether you took a specific critical injury. Pretty much unplayable as a table top game.

So it’s interesting to hear that the first game was created as a table top game.

Bit off topic, sorry about that.

To clarify, I was talking about the current X-COM not the original. That one was designed pen-and-paper, I have no clue about the original X-COM.

Java. It's a great first language. Lots of good IDEs are free. Just grab him a good textbook to work through. If he has the patience, determination, and intelligence at 12 he can be doing simple games like Asteroids! in a couple months.

Start out with Gamemaker - it's simple, and allows you to make all kinds of 2D games, with most features available.

Perfect for the age group as well - it's not raw code, but more advanced games will require you to write some simple code.

Just a quickie as no one has mentioned it.
Has he tried getting deep into Minecraft? Making a very simple game like Hangman or Noughts and Crosses can be somewhat challenging.
That game is so versatile with all of the mod packs that if he wants to storyboard he can go to town with it.
There are still creative new ways to play coming out weekly for inspiration and digging into those premade games will be a simple way to get behind the scenes.