I Want to Make a Video Game With My Kid, But...Well, Everything Makes It Hard
Is it my fault for wanting more time to myself? Does my child not have enough patience? The answer, as is often with parenting, is there are no real answers.
I’m open to running—and paying for!—more pitches at Crossplay, even from those without a byline. I’m more interested in life experience than work experience. Drop me an email. -pk
When my daughter Mezzie asked me to make a video game with her, I learned that none of my skills as a creative team player were a match for a stubborn seven-year-old. It wasn’t only that she didn’t like the art styles I presented to her, or that she kept changing her mind about the game mechanics. She just wouldn’t stay engaged with the process at all.
She is, of course, seven years old. But I was already committed.
I’d been waiting years for a chance to dive into a real creative project with one of my kids, and Mezzie has demonstrated incredible focus on her own pursuits, from comics, to friendship bracelets, to enormous Minecraft builds. Yet somehow, that drive was nowhere on display when we worked on our game. No matter how much I tried to keep things interesting, she’d quickly drift off to watch Rainbow Rangers.
There had to be some way to capture her natural motivation.
Then, I discovered Game Builder Garage, Nintendo’s kid-friendly introduction to visual programming. Without a line of code, Mezzie could make her own games entirely on the Switch, a device she was glued to already. I was sure that this would thread the needle, giving her the flexibility to realize her own vision without an overly-complex interface pushing her away.
As is often the case with children, it did not go exactly as planned.
Mezzie, for her part, was excited to try it out. I handed her the Switch, eager to let her drive the experience. We were dropped into the game’s opening tutorial. She immediately started tapping buttons, trying to skip the text. I winced.
“I think we need to pay attention to this, Mez. It’s telling us how to use everything.”
“It’s boring.”
She wasn’t wrong. Game Builder Garage tries earnestly to present its mechanics in a friendly, playful way—giving different nodes of game logic (called Nodon) distinct personalities, with lots of back-and-forth dialog and little jokes. It’s cute, but it makes simple explanations drag out for minutes on end. I could see Mezzie’s attention flagging.
“Let’s see if we can just skip ahead,” I said. “Maybe you’ll learn better if you just play around with it.”
“The truth is, I brush Mezzie off on a regular basis. Sometimes it’s necessary when I’m working, but frequently it’s just because I want to spend time on creative projects by myself. Everyone needs some alone time, it’s only healthy. But kids grow fast, and I don’t want to miss out on one of the most fun parts of childhood: the wild leaps of imagination.”
Gradually, it dawned on me that we could not. After the initial tutorial, we were met with a list of further lessons, all blocking our path to “Free Programming.” We couldn’t even access the next lesson until we made it through a “checkpoint” that tested our knowledge of the previous tutorial. I found this design decision very odd; sure, the game is made for beginners, but wouldn’t some of them learn better with a hands-on approach?
By this point, Mezzie wasn’t sitting down anymore, much less paying attention. She began cartwheeling around the room, as I realized I was losing my window to engage her with Game Builder Garage. Once she was bored with something, she hardly ever gave it another look.
“Tell you what—I’ll go through the tutorials myself,” I said. “Then, I can just tell you what you need to do, so you can start making your own game.”
“OK,” she said, still cartwheeling. She didn’t sound too enthusiastic. Still, I had a chance now. I wasn’t thrilled about mandatory tutorials either, but at least I could tackle them with the patience and diligence of an adult.
Months went by. I wanted to do the tutorials—really!
But Mezzie quickly forgot about it, distracted by other creative projects, like turning her room into a “mall,” complete with price stickers on all her toys. Without any pressure from her, and with my own time on the Switch already limited to evenings after the girls went to bed, it was all too easy to skip Game Builder Garage and hit a few more shrines in Tears of the Kingdom instead.
Eventually, the sense of obligation caught up with me.
The truth is, I brush Mezzie off on a regular basis. Sometimes it’s necessary when I’m working, but frequently it’s just because I want to spend time on creative projects by myself. Everyone needs some alone time, it’s only healthy. But kids grow fast, and I don’t want to miss out on one of the most fun parts of childhood: the wild leaps of imagination. I was so fixated on making the game with her because it seemed like the perfect chance to bond with my daughter and satisfy my creative drive at the same time. Surely, that was worth the effort of clearing a few tutorials.
If nothing else, I wanted to justify the purchase, so I plowed through the next lesson.
I was thrilled to find that I didn’t need to do all the tutorials to unlock Free Programming (I wished I’d learned this sooner!). I threw together a little proof-of-concept, in which a large cylinder slides at the player, destroying them if they don’t use a box to leap over it in time. Using the Nodon and built-in movement mechanics was fun and easy; I could now see myself using Game Builder Garage as a platform for quick prototyping.
I hoped Mezzie would agree as I handed her the Switch.
She quickly managed the jump, and then had fun fiddling with the game logic, wildly increasing the speed of the cylinder and laughing as it shot across the screen.
“See?” I said. “You can make your entire game this way!”
“How do I make my own character? And backgrounds?”
This, for Mezzie, was key. She had no interest in building an abstract game experience—it had to look and sound like she envisioned.
“Let me take a look.”
Rather than dive back into the in-game tutorials, I picked up my phone to search for how to make custom characters. Sure enough, there were some impressive examples. I opened a YouTube video in which one creator explained his process of making Minecraft-like avatars in the game. As soon as I saw how he’d done it, my heart sank. The simple Nodon interface had become a massive, densely packed spider web of complex logic.
It was impressive that users managed to extend the functionality of Game Builder Garage to this degree, but it wasn’t exactly at a second-grader’s level. Trying to replicate this would, frankly, be much more work than just going back to making Mezzie’s game myself.
That’s the raw truth of game development that defies every cool new toolset: it’s hard. It’s time-consuming and there’s no skipping the tedious parts. Much like teaching. Or parenting.
I put down my phone.
“Why don’t I just try building your game myself again. Can you work with me on the art?”
“Sure!” Mezzie started up her cartwheels again. “But first can you come shop at my mall?”
Very cool read! Thanks for sharing. I was always curious what Game Builder Garage was like and now I know it might not be a great fit for my daughter and I. However, she has started drawing some abstract "Choose your Adventure" stuff on scrap paper, so she is kind of accidentally diving a bit more into this realm. She's just churning out "assets", asking me to choose some clothes to wear, and then when I make a choice she gets to work drawing me wearing the clothes. Then it's a hallway and I have to choose "left or right" and when I pick one, she goes and draws what's in the room. There are certainly more efficient ways to do this, but I'm just letting the unbridled creativity flow (she's 7) and we can work on honing it later if that's what she wants. It's a joy and I know I'm gonna keep this stack of papers forever.