Should I be alarmed?

My 12-year-old girl just announced to me she wants to make a videogame. She’s currently watching RPG Maker tutorials and has completed 100 character designs over the summer.

How should I feel about this?

Besides proud, I mean :smiley:

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My suggestion would be to cross her out of your inheritance while keeping on secretly working on your evil AI project.

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I’ll get her t-shirt made.

Great, I´m sure she might need it later on.

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So, your daughter wanna be…

…A MURDER SIMULATOR DEVELOPER??? :delores:

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I’d be strangely okay with that.

You should tell her that you are proud and happy to see that she has decided to pursue the career of a First Person Shooter game developer. And when she’ll point out that she would prefer to develop games of less popular genres you should just tell her: “Ah ah, honey… F##k no.”

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Here’s the thing, I think she’d be most interested in developing rpgs or minecraft-like games. She has a very acute interest in architecture and character development. I can easily see her making an Undertale.

Alas, I have not managed to interest her in ANY of my beautiful murder simulation games. I guess I’ll have to stick to my current Borderlands group, haha.

I think it’s awesome! She can work on Thimbleweed Park 4: Revenge of Doug.

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Let’s take that as official statement that there will be at least 3 sequels to Thimbleweed Park. Yay!

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Thimbleweed Park 4: Dig Harder :smiley:

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The fact he´s jumping ahead to Part 4 already makes me think he might leave a door open for he ineviatable prequel duology.

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This Part 4 + title was just a joke. We all know Ron thinks in two-thirds trilogies.

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It was also partly stolen from me (my suggestion was Thimbleweed Park 2: The Digging of Doug)

But maybe he already has plans for a bigger Doug origin story, give him his own spinoff or something…

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“Dougue One”

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One of my nephews wanted to be a game programmer and came to me asking for some pointers. I was very excited and gave him links to online resources on learning how to program, and spend several sessions trying to give him the very basics of programming.

It turned out that he, like many other young people, are fascinated by the idea of game programming, but mostly because they think it’s just concept design, artwork, and fun stuff. They don’t really understand that programming is work and maths and logic and all sorts of boring stuff.

It’s fun, of course, but in a different way. It’s like when kids want to be rock stars, but not musicians. They want to produce a record or play gigs, but not spend their afternoons practicing their scales.

To some, the ability to play an instrument or practice with some friends on the week-ends is just the best thing in the world. To others, it’s just a chore. The same with programming games.

If your daughter wants to be a game programmer, that’s great! Encourage her and help her and guide her as best as you can, but also let her know that it’s not all fun and games; it’s work like any other endeavor worth pursuing – but it is worth pursuing.

For the absolute n00b, I always recommend this series of videos (available from Stanford University in iTunesU also). They are by far the best introduction to computer programming I’ve ever seen, in a most accessible, fun, and interesting way – from the very basics of logical structured thinking, to complex software engineering concepts. It’s fabulous.

dZ.

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Discourse cannot handle a YouTube link to a list of videos, here is a usable link:
Course | Programming Methodology

Thanks. It wasn’t intended to be an embedded video, just a hyperlink, I don’t know why it did that.

Discourse knows some specific sites and displays links to them in a special way, e.g. links to YouTube (videos) or Twitter posts.

1vg166

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