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I showed my 9-year-old nephew Scratch, and within an hour he had designed a dancing man that made noise and moved around. It makes creating interactive games an

I showed my 9-year-old nephew Scratch, and within an hour he had designed a dancing man that made noise and moved around. It makes creating interactive games and stories easy and fun. Why isn't there a Scratch for adults? A serious tool targeted to artists and professionals that makes it easy to publish interactive stories and presentations using standard web tech.

renesd 9y ago
renpy is a visual novel engine you were looking for. https://www.renpy.org/ https://www.renpy.org/
tonydiv 9y ago
I actually think Scratch is great for adults to learn how to program. I think there isn't a Scratch for artists/professionals to create because the educational aspect is hard to nail, and pairing that with a publishing tool is even harder. It's not impossible, but it sounds really hard to get right.
austenallred 9y ago
> Why isn't there a Scratch for adults? What exactly would be different between a Scratch for kids and a Scratch for adults?
- e12e 9y ago
  In some ways the the Pharo fork/branch of Squeak Smalltalk might be seen as an answer answer to the related question of "How would Squeak (Smalltalk) for adults differ from Squeak". One problem I see with Scratch is its slow pace in moving forward away from flash and toward something that is easy to self-host: cloud only is great until underpowered Internet at your local library forces kids to stop coding mid session. Flash can sometimes be a challenge to get to work reliably in a modern browser on a pc you might not have admin rights on (compared to something based on fairly conservative js, like https://www.lively-kernel.org/ https://www.lively-kernel.org/). I've briefly looked at the Berkley snap!-project, and it looks a little easier to get into self-hosting and modifying (but I've yet to do so): https://snap.berkeley.edu/ https://snap.berkeley.edu/ In the same breath, I should probably also mention croquet/cobalt - although it appears no one has yet picked it up and ported it to the new generation of vr headsets: http://www.opencobalt.net/ http://www.opencobalt.net/ To save some searching: http://pharo.org/ http://pharo.org/ http://squeak.org/ http://squeak.org/
  - jackewiehose 9y ago
    It's frustrating to upvote a post that favours flash over any other technology but I have to agree with you. I don't like this always-online trend for all kinds of applications. (generally spoken - I don't know the scratch situation)
WillPostForFood 9y ago
For games, you can try Stencyl, which is really cool, but I think you'll quickly be wanting access to some sort of scripting language as the drag and drop can start to get tiresome once you get past basic interactions. http://www.stencyl.com/ http://www.stencyl.com/
dragonwriter 9y ago
There's a lot of things that kind of meet that definition; many of the non-educational visual programming languages on this list: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_programming_language#Visual_languages https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_programming_language#...

renesd 9y ago

renpy is a visual novel engine you were looking for. https://www.renpy.org/ https://www.renpy.org/

tonydiv 9y ago

I actually think Scratch is great for adults to learn how to program. I think there isn't a Scratch for artists/professionals to create because the educational aspect is hard to nail, and pairing that with a publishing tool is even harder. It's not impossible, but it sounds really hard to get right.

austenallred 9y ago

> Why isn't there a Scratch for adults? What exactly would be different between a Scratch for kids and a Scratch for adults?

e12e 9y ago
In some ways the the Pharo fork/branch of Squeak Smalltalk might be seen as an answer answer to the related question of "How would Squeak (Smalltalk) for adults differ from Squeak". One problem I see with Scratch is its slow pace in moving forward away from flash and toward something that is easy to self-host: cloud only is great until underpowered Internet at your local library forces kids to stop coding mid session. Flash can sometimes be a challenge to get to work reliably in a modern browser on a pc you might not have admin rights on (compared to something based on fairly conservative js, like https://www.lively-kernel.org/ https://www.lively-kernel.org/). I've briefly looked at the Berkley snap!-project, and it looks a little easier to get into self-hosting and modifying (but I've yet to do so): https://snap.berkeley.edu/ https://snap.berkeley.edu/ In the same breath, I should probably also mention croquet/cobalt - although it appears no one has yet picked it up and ported it to the new generation of vr headsets: http://www.opencobalt.net/ http://www.opencobalt.net/ To save some searching: http://pharo.org/ http://pharo.org/ http://squeak.org/ http://squeak.org/
- jackewiehose 9y ago
  It's frustrating to upvote a post that favours flash over any other technology but I have to agree with you. I don't like this always-online trend for all kinds of applications. (generally spoken - I don't know the scratch situation)

WillPostForFood 9y ago

For games, you can try Stencyl, which is really cool, but I think you'll quickly be wanting access to some sort of scripting language as the drag and drop can start to get tiresome once you get past basic interactions. http://www.stencyl.com/ http://www.stencyl.com/

dragonwriter 9y ago

There's a lot of things that kind of meet that definition; many of the non-educational visual programming languages on this list: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_programming_language#Visual_languages https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_programming_language#...