D'Oh! Yes! Thanks. Don't know how I missed it. What an amazing game you've made! I was never able to play Fez when it came out and I am glad your version was my introduction.
Quick question: do you think PICO-8 / Lua is too hard for an 11-year-old to learn? Or should we start with Scratch? Their only coding experience so far has been Game Builder Garage on Nintendo Switch. Thank you for your time and I won't bother you again if you respond.
Aww, thank you so much!
PICO-8 is pretty friendly to learn but that might be a bit of a jarring leap directly from Game Builder Garage, especially since it would have a very different workflow as far as I can tell. Since Scratch is free and easy to access I figure you might as well try tinkering with it. Around your age I believe I was mostly using GameMaker, which was a great way to learn since it had both drag-and-drop and written coding options.
If you're really interested in PICO-8 specifically, I've heard good things about the LazyDevsAcademy tutorials. You could maybe look at those to get more of a sense of what it's like to work with. On the PICO-8 forums (https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?cat=7#sub=2) you can also view the full code of any cart by clicking the little "Code" button on the lower edge of the player window if you want to look at how folks did things.
Sorry for the late reply,
If they do end up experimenting with Scratch, the projects I taught at Oakland's video game museum might be interesting or useful. They were all designed to be teachable in an hour and a half, and a lot of them have empty templates next to the finished product, like they did in old cooking shows, before cooking shows got feisty.
Don't be too surprised if they jump from code thing to code thing really quickly! It's like anything, we evaluate our interests as we go. Scratch's limitations might not suit them after a while, and then there's a whole other universe of alternatives. Happy hacking!
