You have a born game
designer on your hands. It is important to not assume this means they are super interested in programming. They may be, but game design is its own thing. HN will skew you towards programming first, naturally.
I agree with this other advice. Do "tabletop" first. It doesn't have to be fancy, even just notecards or paper. You can iterate very quickly on the core game loop and "finding the fun". If you do want something fancier than just paper and words, a great option is printing on full page sticker paper and then attach that to chipboard (you can get it cheap online) and then just cut it out. You have a game that feels a lot more real than just notecards. There are lots of online resources for fast prototyping of card and board games. There are lots of Discords around game design and a lot of game conventions have a "prototype" area where designers showcase their games to get feedback and improve them. There are podcasts like Ludology and Building the Game to help give more theory of game design dicussions. (If you are US based, look up Unpub, Protospiel, etc...)
(I design card and board games as a hobby, the industry is very friendly and loves to mentor!)
I listened to the Slay the Spire episode of a game design podcast, and when he mentioned that they were testing things with pencil and paper to “play” the game I was like “wow that’s so simple and so smart”
I would think you could apply some amount of paper and pencil iteration to most game types, and even if you can’t for action games, that’s fine.
In the context of StS, the specifically were discussing how the mechanics of the Defect character would work. In something more like an action game eg an FPS, you could do something similar with trying out different sets of stats and perks and measuring approximate TTK vs other builds.
On paper, you can test out the balance and math of all the "action" more deliberately. So taking a "fast twitch" game and pretending it is turn based for testing. Of course, you can math out the win/lose percentages and hit rates and adjust your numbers. But one of the good adages in game design is to first make the math right, and then make it fun. Players will perceive different success rates than the math bears out. (See MtG and shuffling and land draws) You may have to adjust off the perfect math to create the experience you want your players to have. It doesn't matter if your game is "fair" if no players feel and believe that and stop playing as a consequence.
Plus, if you are looking to teach a child interested in programming specifically, you might consider Snap/Build Your Own Blocks [0], an extension of Scratch made partially by an instructor of SICP at Berkeley to support things like anonymous functions, prototypes, and metaprogramming. It seems robust enough a child given it now could get right up to undergraduate introductory CS as the genuine article! I would have been amazed if any of the systems to enable kids to make games of my childhood (which I did get a pretty unrepresentatively bad batch of besides) had that kind of potential to them. Imagine a high schooler today reading, say, a blog post about their favorite game's scripting system for its quest designers and implementing its high level beat for beat themselves. Sure it'll run disappointingly slow but the education potential is immense.
Game Maker is what started it all for me over 20 years ago. Once I picked up the scripting language Python and Lua quickly followed. I think I owe my entire career in software to this program.
this is great advice. let them focus on designing gameplay right now. once they've designed a core game loop and they're proud of it, maybe they'll want to learn how to implement it in software, or maybe they'll want to make some sort of physical product (game book, card deck, miniatures, etc.), or maybe they'll want to move on and design a whole new game.
tabletop simulator (on steam) is an easy platform for designing tabletop games. it has lots of built-in assets, you can import your assets, it has lots of built-in concepts that are common to games (zones/hands/inventories/meeples/etc). rules-enforcement is mostly done by the players (multiplayer is supported) just like when playing games in real life, so it's great for prototyping and playtesting without coding up formal logic.
I don't think Dreams gets enough credit because it came out at the end of the PlayStation 4's life and it didn't get a lot of marketing, but it absolutely is fantastic. I'd say it's the best implementation of visual scripting I've ever seen, and that's using a traditional game controller (or two PSMove controllers) instead of a mouse/keyboard. That's not even including the modeling tools or music tools.
As someone who makes games, I often hear people ask me "how do I get started?" And my first answer is always "learn C." When they look at me funny, I say, "Try Dreams on Playstation."
Apparently they were working on a PC port but it was abandoned after declining sales. I really really hope someone buys the IP and finishes the port, because it would be a massive success.
Inkle as well, it's got an easy online editor and lets you do basically choose your own adventures, kindof like a linear zork/infocom story engine (stories can branch, but usually move forward).
The tools in Roblox are not that simple and are pretty geared towards technical people. They're cool! But in this case I think there are better ways to start.
Isn’t that the idea though? To do something technical? I don’t know, maybe thousands of gifted kids are thriving at making fun things in Roblox Studio. They get through the grind because it’s where the friends are. Whereas a kid getting excited about Twine? Seems really lame, which is guaranteed to make a gifted kid only performatively interested.
You have a born game designer on your hands. It is important to not assume this means they are super interested in programming. They may be, but game design is its own thing. HN will skew you towards programming first, naturally.
Check these out:
- Adventure Game Studio (https://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/)
- Twine (https://twinery.org/)
And these have more visual ways of programming which could let them express their ideas with less friction
- Dreams (Playstation)
- Unity (with Playmaker or Bolt visual scripting)
- Godot
And the other suggestions of Scratch are good, but I find Scratch to feel like a way to learn programming more than expressing game design.
Lastly, explore card and tabletop games with them. It’s a whole thing!