I got my kids to switch over from using PICO-8 to TIC-80; woo. In the end it was the support seeing more columns of code at a time that did it.
With the older one I'm able to mostly just advise and point him at tutorials. With the younger I'm doing most of coding and leaving the maps/graphics to him, but that means I get to use #fennel.
@technomancy If they have a go at a dungeon crawler, sign me up for beta testing.
@aidalgol so far we've got "a grassy field in which ninjas randomly appear" and "walking around a place with lakes and roads but you can talk to people" so not looking like a dungeon crawler is going to happen any time soon
@technomancy That sounds like my early "games" in Stagecast.
@codingquark @technomancy I think I missed the tail-end of the HyperCard era, and my dad didn't buy it earlier for himself to play around with (he's a coder by trade). Instead, I had Stagecast (the successor to Cocoa), and a VisualBasic variant for the Classic Mac OS which was EOL'd within a year of purchase. (And it wasn't cheap!)
@codingquark @technomancy Fast forward about 12 years and he's teaching me C and Ruby on with Emacs an eMac running Ubuntu. (I switched to Debian on an x86 PC within a year.)
@technomancy I am a bit envious of the tools they have access to now that wouldn't even have been feasible when I was their age.
*shakes cane*