I have never done any game development and my primary programming experience for the last few years has been JavaScript.
My 10 year old daughter has a lot of ideas for games, but since I have no game programming experience I literally have no idea where to start with her. Does anyone have any suggestions for a good framework / toolset to get started for a simple game?
Game Maker[0] has a pretty intuitive UI and comes with a very basic (albeit proprietary) scripting language, so making 2d games at least is quite simple. Although the scripting language may be too simple for more than a rudimentary introduction to programming languages. Better than Alice though.
Construct 2[1] is a game framework for HTML5 and javascript, and Unity[2] has tutorials[2a] for basic games and it uses javascript, C# and "boo" (basically python) for scripting.
[2a] for versions prior to 5 - I don't know how many tutorials for the current version of Unity there are - you may want to check first and consider an older version.
I'm a big fan of processing for learning. It does just the sort of things you want out of the box, it comes with lots of examples, there are books available on it, the time to get set up and running your own programs is practically nil, and it runs the same way regardless of the platform you put it on. All great stuff for a "toy."
My 10 year old daughter has a lot of ideas for games, but since I have no game programming experience I literally have no idea where to start with her. Does anyone have any suggestions for a good framework / toolset to get started for a simple game?