Readit NewsBSTRhino commented on Adventure Game Studio: OSS software for creating adventure games adventuregamestudio.co.uk... · Posted by u/doener
I think that Wadjet Eye Games studio still uses AGS for their games, and most (all?) of the games published by them seems to use AGS as well.
I highly recommend checking their catalogue. While the first installements of Blackwell series didn't age that well I still think they are a quite nice starting point – they are short and memorable.
I truly loved Old Skies! It was my favourite game last year.
https://easel.games
A beginner-friendly programming language for 2D games where multiplayer is automatic. Intended to be an engaging way for teenagers to learn to code by making games they can play with their friends. Like a blend of Scratch and Roblox. I've been working on this for 3 years!
BSTRhino commented on Show HN: Easel - learn to code by making games you can play together easel.games/... · Posted by u/BSTRhino
why don't you people give people normal coding thing
If you're asking why Easel is a new programming language and not an existing one, the biggest reason is that building our own programming language meant we could build multiplayer into the fabric of the programming language, making multiplayer 100% automatic. There is a big difference between 99% automatic and 100% automatic. When it's 100% automatic, you really can put it in the hands of a beginner programmer on their first day of coding and they can actually make a multiplayer game. Teenagers these days spend a lot of time playing online multiplayer games and we believe that give them a tool that lets them make them themselves is an attractive enough proposition for them to choose Easel over other choices.
I saw this shared recently. The site presents nicely, and I agree there's a gap there. As a university professor, the story of my students' learning has pretty much been; Scratch, some Python, and then they pick up whatever early-college curriculum is. There's a strong preference for scripting languages like Python and JavaScript.
When you say "what teenagers should do after learning Scratch," what do you mean exactly? Should do to what end? How would Easel present as "the clear thing" they should do? I suppose Scratch wasn't really chosen by these young people; it is obviously simple, and has the prestige of MIT. Schools followed suit.
You're in a different situation, where you have to meet this market in the open. When I visit your site, I am met with code. It's not apparently simple, and a beginner wouldn't be able to distinguish it from any other games programming framework. I think it's actually scarier-seeming to a beginner than something like Godot's scene editor, where you can just drag images from your disk into a prototype-view of your game-scene.
I hope my plainness in stating this isn't taken as an insult. You've got so much work there, and the site is impressive. I also care about this topic, age-range and the learning process, so I'm trying to be helpful with my perspective.
Thank you and I am pleased whenever someone engages and gives me their honest thoughts, it is always helpful.
Maybe I'll rewind a bit, and I'm sorry if this is a long post!
I've just had a teenager who finished making a Chess game in Easel after about a month's work, his most advanced programming project so far. This teenager started in Scratch, has done some Python, but the language they have spent the most time in has been Easel. I've also had a couple of teenagers who have said things like "I suck at coding" and yet make spend months making these quite sophisticated Easel projects full of coding. These two teenagers also did a bit of Scratch but also were lost and disengaged when it came to Python. This mirrors what I've seen in Code Clubs as well, where teenagers just lost interest when shown Python.
Eventually, if someone is going to learn to code for real, they must make the transition from a visual programming language to a text-based programming language, and I know that I have seen teenagers get lost attempting to cross that gap. There are teenagers who obviously have had no trouble with this and that's great, they should go straight to Python or JavaScript or whatever is their heart's desire!
The difference between Scratch and most other programming languages is more than just visual vs text-based. Scratch is actually this cool concurrent, asynchronous, event-driven programming language. This makes it easy to write things like "wait 0.3 seconds" then "move 2 steps to the right". Most other game engines, including PyGame and Godot, instead use a frame-by-frame model. This means you often have to code things as state machines, where you pick up and put down state so that an entity can remember what it was doing next frame. That example of "wait 0.3 seconds" then "move 2 steps to the right" would require the control flow to jump up and down the codebase between state and logic, which means the shape of the code no longer mirrors the step-by-step of what it is actually doing. I think Scratch is successful not just because of its visual coding, but because its programming model allows for step-by-step logic to look like step-by-step code. There's no reason a text-based programming language couldn't also have this property.
Easel is concurrent, asynchronous, event-driven, like Scratch, which is why both Easel and Scratch code can be written in this sequential step-by-step way that you can't easily achieve in other programming languages.
Why can't you just write `await sleep(0.3s)` in other programming languages? Their issue is you can't cancel an `await`, which means it is easy for an asynchronous task to outlive its entity and so they are not safe beginner-level constructs. Scratch solves this implicitly because all scripts are part of a sprite, and when your sprite is removed, all its concurrent scripts stop. It's so intuitive that it doesn't really need to be taught. Easel has a similar thing but in text-based form - it is a hierarchical programming language and everything inside of an entity's block`{ }` gets auto-cleaned up when it dies, including all asynchronous tasks belonging to that entity. I think that's why in Easel, I've seen teenagers spinning up hundreds of asynchronous threads all the time without any problems.
All of this is to say that Easel is like halfway between Scratch and Python. It keeps a lot of the intuitive parts of Scratch's cool programming model, but in text form. My hope (and we have seen this already a few times) is that it can help more teenagers cross the gap from visual coding to "grown up" text-based programming languages.
The reason the code sample is at the top is actually because I saw a teenager talk aloud as they were reading that code and understanding it in real-time. It was super cool because that's it, that's what I've been trying to do - make a text-based programming language that is legible to beginners and not convoluted. And I'm trying to figure out whether it is possible to replicate that moment over and over again with new teenagers.
There is a lot more to it. Easel adds a lot of other stuff like a physics engine and automatic multiplayer. But this post is getting long so I will stop there. I really appreciate the thoughts. I am definitely going to be thinking about how that homepage is presenting itself and I think it is fair what you say that it doesn't look simple, and doesn't look different to any other game engine. That is very good feedback!
https://easel.games
I'm working on a beginner-friendly online programming language for teenagers who want to learn to code. I think there is not a clear enough winner for what teenagers should do after they learn Scratch so I am trying to make it.
A beginner-friendly programming language for 2D games where multiplayer is automatic. Intended to be an engaging way for teenagers to learn to code by making games they can play with their friends. Like a blend of Scratch and Roblox. I've been working on this for 3 years!