Forums » Help » Considering Impact To Introduce 11yr Old to Game Development

There are probably a million threads like this, but I'm gonna do it anyway! Here's the short version of my question: is Impact easy enough for an 11yr old to understand to create a very basic "first game?"

A little background... my girlfriend's youngest son is 11 & is (of course) enamored by video games. Anything & everything that can be played on his iPhone (yea, don't get me started), our iPad, xBox, or PC.

He's constantly daydreaming and sketching out games... not a week goes by without him asking me if we can make his "new game" (new, because he just came up with yet another one). Most of his games seem very Action-RPG-ish, and he'd be content with top-down or scroll without a doubt.

About me: I've been in various forms of IT for 12 years. Most of my experience is in the data layer: architecture / modeling, integrations, ETL, SQL, etc. A recent career shift has me dealing with a lot more front-end work, including HTML, CSS, PHP & JavaScript. Long story short: I'm learning & picking it up quickly - I can read & adjust code far better than writing from scratch, though.

From what I've seen in a day of reviewing, it seems like this is one of the best frameworks for someone who is learning, but how steep is the learning curve, really? Is the Weltmeister robust enough for a top-down RPG (I've found a lot of side-scroll demos, but not much in the way of top-down). I saw the Pong demo & a great link for top-down controls, which is encouraging, but I still feel the need to ask.

All in all, it seems like $99 is a very reasonable fee for what you get with Impact, but are the tools enough to get me & a kid started?

The tools are plenty powerful if you know how to use them.

One of the things I liked best about Impact when I first started out was the documentation. It is written in a way that's very easy to understand.

There's a wealth of information already available in the forums, and some very intelligent people who are active in the community.

So in my opinion, yeah, it's a good place to learn.

Thanks for the reply. The forums seem to be very active, which gives me confidence that even if I can't figure it out, someone here can help.

I'd say it depends on how much actual coding you want involved. That's really the biggest learning curve. Although impact doesn't take a whole lot of coding to get a lot of cool stuff to happen but it's not as interactive as a few other engines. Some of them have their own IDE's and let you code and design levels all together making things a little less abstract.

Another alternative you could consider is http://gamesalad.com. I haven't used it myself but they claim drag-and-drop, no coding game creation.

ImpactJS is still a fantastic engine and still one of the best Javascript engines available.

If you're happier adjusting code, a good place to start might be following the tutorial in this book: http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920022633.do It's a side scroller, not RPG, but it covers all the basics of developing a game in ImpactJS. Once you've followed that together you can make your own graphics for it, tweak some of the mechanics, make your own levels, and generally make the game your own. After that hopefully you'll be ready to start on your own project.

Also check out http://www.pointofimpactjs.com/ for loads more tutorials, code snippets, example games and so on.

Thanks for everyone's replies. I think I'm going to take the plunge & join the community (as soon as our new laptop gets here).