I'm making a beginner-friendly 2D game programming language for online games. This month I added stencils, which limit rendering to particular shapes, and can be used for scene transitions but also some other cool effects like fog-of-war. One day I hope to see thousands of teenagers learning to code with Easel!
I’ve got a Discord from my previous game of about 2000 people, mostly teenagers, and my testers have mostly come from there. To name one example, just yesterday a teenager completed a chess game after 3-4 weeks on Easel. I’ve been incorporating tons of feedback from the testers over the past year and a half.
I think that it may look strange to a person who has coded before because the language is semi-declarative. Most teenagers come to Easel as players with no prior programming experience, and begin by remixing their favourite game, and that’s when the semi-declarative model really shines. Many interesting changes can be done in a single edit because the code is clumped together in a hierarchy. Whereas in another programming language there may be more indirection and you might need to edit 3 separate parts in different files to make 1 change, and people who haven’t coded before don’t know how to find all the parts. I think Easel works for players becoming makers but can feel strange for people who come from other languages.
Readit News
I went through the demo on the first page and found it quite complex (but then I am stuck in existing patterns of course).
I think that it may look strange to a person who has coded before because the language is semi-declarative. Most teenagers come to Easel as players with no prior programming experience, and begin by remixing their favourite game, and that’s when the semi-declarative model really shines. Many interesting changes can be done in a single edit because the code is clumped together in a hierarchy. Whereas in another programming language there may be more indirection and you might need to edit 3 separate parts in different files to make 1 change, and people who haven’t coded before don’t know how to find all the parts. I think Easel works for players becoming makers but can feel strange for people who come from other languages.