I have been meeting with my 10 year old nephew about once a week to make video games together. It’s mostly just to have fun and for me to also chat with his dad, who helps on his side—we’re across the country from each other. His dad and I went to middle school together and got kicked out of wood shop and into a computer “shop” where we learned to program on the Commodore PET. We were 13 at the time and learned enough BASIC to make simple games. So, in a way, we’re carrying on that tradition.

My first program back then was to draw on the screen given a list of coordinates. It was about 5 lines of real code (and a dozen lines of DATA). It was easy to understand and it put stuff on the screen right away, which was my first lesson in programming.

It’s hard to do that in modern programming, especially if you want to be able to keep going on to build something more real. There’s just so much boilerplate and ceremony to just get something on the screen.

After some trial and error, I have settled on using Phaser as our game engine and Glitch as our editor.

Glitch lets you edit code like a google doc. We can both be in the editor and change code simultaneously. Ironically, it took me time to remember Glitch even though I got to witness its genesis inside of Fogcreek when I was working at Trello.

Glitch is easiest to use with JavaScript, so I had to pick a JS game engine. Since someone already had made a remixable Phaser game, I started with that. My second lesson in programming is that it’s easier to learn how to modify a working thing than to make something from scratch. This is really an extension of the first lesson—when you are making something bigger, it takes too long to get something working, so to learn how to make big things, start with the big thing already done. First you modify parts to get a sense of all the pieces, and then later, you will be able to make one from scratch.

I’ll post some of our games next week. They are mostly simple ports of classic 2D games from the 80’s and 90’s.