Making games with the kids

Lost to the mists of time

Once upon a few times, I would sit down on a Saturday morning and propose to my eldest (around 5 at the time) if she would like to help make a game.

I would get her busy with drawing characters on paper for me to photograph into sprites or for her to use my phone to photograph her toys. While that was happening I would frantically try and get a quick and dirty game loop coded, basic controls, a placeholder sprite, some semblance of gameplay.

It was like a gamejam but with the more intense pressure of not being able to trip up on anything for fear of disappointing your firstborn. Or going too slow that they would lose interest and the quality moment would evaporate.

I think I produced a handful of such games, sweating over how to neatly extract the image of a fluffy toy from its background without too much fuss, dropping it into some janky little game of simple shooting or E to interact type thing. Honestly it was really fun, because the wonder of an hour or twos investment yielding a moment of my child’s own recorded voice coming from a little drawn or photographed character on screen was pure joy and delight.

No regrets at all, and I while I suspect I’d be pretty rusty at hand coding that fast now, I’m still enamored by the intensity of it.

THE NEW WAY FORWARD

So with my second kid we had a similar moment today; “Can we make a game together Dad?” “Yeah sure, let’s do it”. But then instead of the drawing and the furious flurry of barely functional code, I recorded a conversation between us about what we want the game to be, grabbed the transcript, tidied it up a bit, gave it to claude, and then while claude furiously tinkered away - we played one of our other home made games, almost like bug testing (more feedback for another claude really).

About an hour later, give or take a few “Is it ready yet?”, lo and behold it was in fact ready. And we gave it a try, and it was kinda janky, but it also kinda worked - certainly much more than a single afternoon’s effort.

We had a working game, playable enough that both the kid’s had a few goes and made suggestions for improvements. And we all had a fun time playing it together.

But I don’t know, I guess I’m romanticizing the struggle of the old way, but it did feel a bit somehow ‘less’. I think my kids loved it, so I think it’s just a me thing, maybe because I know I just let ai do all the heavy lifting and because I knew just how relatively little effort I put in, that it wasn’t the same.

But ACTUALLY..

It’s a choice, I made the choice, so this isn’t a commentary on society or anything else. Just kinda sharing the process and a link to the game. Thinking about it more, this is still our shared vision and creation and it’s still special to us and reflects an afternoon spent together shaping an idea, that is a good memory to have.