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I got into programming from a no-code tool as a kid: Stagecraft. An education/gamedev tool aimed at kids and looking back it was really neat. You had a grid and
by tgb 6y ago
I got into programming from a no-code tool as a kid: Stagecraft. An education/gamedev tool aimed at kids and looking back it was really neat. You had a grid and gave rules to objects on the grid by pattern-matching the surrounding grid cells. Right arrow key makes the player move right, if the cell to the right is empty. If there's a block already to the right but an empty square beyond it, move the player and the block. You just laid out a "start" state and a "final" state and whenever the start state was met, it would replace with the end state. A ton of basic (and not-so-basic) games and fun things could be made really easily with this. More advanced users could do something closer to traditional programming by giving objects variables and manipulating those, making "folders" of rules that controlled which ones could run, etc. I made a fairly full-fledged short JRPG in it, and other people's projects were even better. Frankly, I finished more gamedev projects playing around with that than I ever did after learning to code!
I could see something like that succeeding in the modern era if you make it easier to share - you needed Stagecraft to run anything made by it. Anything modern with this grid+rule system like that already?
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y agoOff the top of my head, PuzzleScript[0] sounds similar. There are some really good games written in it too. Although since the rules are written in text and pretty opaque, one wonders if a GUI tool to write PuzzleScript rules might make it more accessible. [0] https://www.puzzlescript.net/ https://www.puzzlescript.net/
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]