Hi everyone. I'm looking to start a new game project with my kids who are homeschooled and very into game creation. They have so far just made games in RPG maker and the Doom game engine that just shipped with the last release. I want to make a real project and walk them through it so they can get some real life experience in large project flow and I want them to learn to work with one another and on a team.

Any suggestions on this venture. Is there a engine that would be better? Are there engines to stay away from considering the situation? Are there recommended game types?...

You get the idea. I'm new to this for the most part except for working for EA as a QA person a long time ago I don't have experience in the field. You guys do know what you are talking about. Any advice would be super appreciated. Thanks.

3 hours ago, OzWalt said:

Hi everyone. I'm looking to start a new game project with my kids who are homeschooled and very into game creation. They have so far just made games in RPG maker and the Doom game engine that just shipped with the last release. I want to make a real project and walk them through it so they can get some real life experience in large project flow and I want them to learn to work with one another and on a team.

Any suggestions on this venture. Is there a engine that would be better? Are there engines to stay away from considering the situation? Are there recommended game types?...

You get the idea. I'm new to this for the most part except for working for EA as a QA person a long time ago I don't have experience in the field. You guys do know what you are talking about. Any advice would be super appreciated. Thanks.

Hi! I can only imagine how happy you are with two kids that love game programming... best wishes for their future. 

Can I ask you how old are they? My suggestion would change quite a bit depending on the age they have.

Leonardo

The ones who will be participating in making the game will be 16, 14 and 12.

Well it depends on how much programming experience you have and on how much you want your kids to learn to program, as they're surely ready to start learning how to program for serious.

You could:

-Let them use a basic game library like SDL or something similar, so that they're able to develop good programming skills while still avoiding all the operating system weirdness, and while the older son could maybe work on the more "hard" things like rendering and simulation, the youngest could start working on more funny and "gamy" things like map editor, UI, etc.

Surely this is the hard way to go, but your kids would learn WAY more this way than just letting them use unreal or unity.

I would only suggest this if you have a certain amount of programming experience, as your sons will probably ask for your help from time to time.

-If you don't have a lot of programming experience, I would probably go the standard unreal-unity way, probably choosing unity as it's probably more versatile relative to UE.

If you have the possiblity, I would strongly suggest going the hard way, as your kids will learn something that can basically guarantee them a job when they're adult. (Non necessarily in the game industry of course).

Sure they will be less productive in the short period, but once they've learned a good amount of programming practices, they're productivity will skyrocket.

Leonardo