Cute Story

[TrevorBradley]

After working on Galactic Artifact for the past few weeks, my 11 year old daughter asked me again about programming. I was going to hold off and learn ActionScript with her, but she was keen to try today so we tried C++/SDL/SDL_gfx.

After giving her a stub and going through the basic concepts of variable assignment, while loops and if statements, she now has her first SDL game she's working on... Monkey vs Chicken. Sure it's just two circles of varying size and colour chasing each other around the screen, but I find it pretty cool.

Two player multiplayer by sharing the keyboard. I'll see if I can convince her to port it to the GP2x..

 

[gruso]

Hehe, that's cool.

Might I suggest some sprites?

 

[TrevorBradley]

Gruso, that's absolutely fantastic. You've made my day! My daughter thinks they're awesome as well.

EDIT: About time I got an avatar...

 

[cb88]

commmunities... they are awesomeness

pretty cool that your daughter is interested in programing... its always fun for me to teach people stuff about computers ....

 

[gruso]

Gruso, that's absolutely fantastic. You've made my day! My daughter thinks they're awesome as well.

EDIT: About time I got an avatar...

Excellent! Let me know if you need a background image stolen from somewhere too. :lol:

 

[TrevorBradley]

Gruso, that's absolutely fantastic. You've made my day! My daughter thinks they're awesome as well.

EDIT: About time I got an avatar...

Excellent! Let me know if you need a background image stolen from somewhere too. :lol:

Gruso, did those images come from anywhere in particular, or are you a fantastic artist who can whip up monkeys and chickens in a quarter hour?

I have to convince her to bring the game size down to 320x240 before thinking about backgrounds. She went straight to 1024x768..

My eight year old wants to learn now too...

EDIT: The internet is both informative and disturbing...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=02rlGHsqLOQ

 

[PSyMastR]

That chicken fight was amazing!

 

[gruso]

I wish I had the skills (if I did, I'd have my hand up to help with Galactic Artifact in a flash.) Photoshop hackery is the extent of my ability.

 

[benjymous]

I have to convince her to bring the game size down to 320x240 before thinking about backgrounds. She went straight to 1024x768..

You could do what I'm doing - develop everything at a large PC screen res with big sprites, and just resize the sprites down on load for a smaller screen size - just have a constant "scale" factor defined somewhere, and use that when loading and drawing your sprites.

You could later shunt that to an offline build process that rescales all the sprites, to save the hardware from having to do it at runtime

 

[MilanC]

Will she release the source, though?

 

[TrevorBradley]

I have to convince her to bring the game size down to 320x240 before thinking about backgrounds. She went straight to 1024x768..

You could do what I'm doing - develop everything at a large PC screen res with big sprites, and just resize the sprites down on load for a smaller screen size - just have a constant "scale" factor defined somewhere, and use that when loading and drawing your sprites.

You could later shunt that to an offline build process that rescales all the sprites, to save the hardware from having to do it at runtime


She's using SDL_gfx graphics primitives just like me... The trick is to get her to define everything in respect to the screen width and height.

Really this is about learning variable assignment, while loops, ifs, testing for boolean truth and falseness, and algorithms.

 

[Username]

Might it be ported to the Pandora?

 

[cosurgi]

commmunities... they are awesomeness

pretty cool that your daughter is interested in programing... its always fun for me to teach people stuff about computers ....

Can't wait when mine gets interested too. But now she is 5 years, and learning slowly to write. She almost can read

 

[crasherball]

wow, all ur daughters already pwn me in programing lol