I was never much of a game developer, but recently my 5 year old son wanted to play a game so we decided to build one together.
It's a boat game, you basically steer a boat in an isometric 2d world, transporting passengers, cargo etc between ports.
As we designed it, the ideas just kept on coming. He made or directed a lot of the art inside of the game (even the audio), and we included friends and family as characters within the game.
A lot of fun to build - hilarious at times. I used Lua and LÖVE2D, building basically a game engine for an isometric world, so that took significantly more time than expected.
If you want to test it [1], please do, but keep in mind it's only in Norwegian, but I am sure most people would be able to figure it out as it's meant for age group 5 and up:
I'm super curious how you make the development process interesting for him. I get that a 5yo would be good at generating ideas but how do you then go "okay, now I'll need a week in front of a screen to build all these ideas" and not have him lose interest. Do you accelerate using LLMs?
Yeah, good question! We can do a lot of the creative process on paper, with his styrofoam models, and audio effects etc without even being near the computer. Then when I need to go ahead and write code, it's not going to be that interesting for him, but I've shown him how it works and how we can change stuff.
A lot of the very technical parts are done during the evenings after he's asleep, and I think that's okay, as it'll end up in a better result the next day so he can go and test and give further feedback.
Oh yes, I eventually did less hand coding and relied more on Claude Code to get the job done. I understand the game loop, the architecture and the algorithms, which I think is important. Don't hide that under the hood.
I also attempted to make a game with my eldest daughter initially. Unsurprisingly, she didn't want to sit there watching me code or drag things around in Godot's level editor.
Admittedly, I really need to make a new blog post showing the latest improvements brought about from the in school pilot I'm running weekly at the moment.
This looks really nice. Given the target age I imagine there's not a heap of text, so you could probably get away with LLM translations. Be sure to share it again in the coming months if you add English :)
I was never much of a game developer, but recently my 5 year old son wanted to play a game so we decided to build one together.
It's a boat game, you basically steer a boat in an isometric 2d world, transporting passengers, cargo etc between ports.
As we designed it, the ideas just kept on coming. He made or directed a lot of the art inside of the game (even the audio), and we included friends and family as characters within the game.
A lot of fun to build - hilarious at times. I used Lua and LÖVE2D, building basically a game engine for an isometric world, so that took significantly more time than expected.
If you want to test it [1], please do, but keep in mind it's only in Norwegian, but I am sure most people would be able to figure it out as it's meant for age group 5 and up:
[1] https://apps.apple.com/no/app/b%C3%A5tspillet/id6791630382
At this point our entire extended family and their kids, grandchildren etc are actually playing this, so it's been super fun.