[mneedham]

Wouldn't take anything quite so extensive - I'll do it here! I accidentally let my son play through all of Shadow of the Colossus with me, much to my wife's chagrin. He loved it.

This past weekend he said, "Dad, let's play Shadow of the Colossus!" I said, "No." He paused for a moment and said, "Dad... how do video games work?" I paused for a moment and said, "You know what? Let's make one!"

So we sat down at the computer together, did some quick research on available simple JS game engines (I was hoping for something easy and HTML5 but nothing surfaced...) and decided on the type of game to make. After that we had some conversations about gameplay mechanics and characters. We talked around characters for a bit and he sketched out some ideas. Mr. Muscle and Crocodilehead were born.

I picked apart the (horrible compressed JS) code a little bit to figure out how the game worked and then we looked through sprites together. After identifying the various sprites he set to work, drawing base sprites (about 10 of them for Mr. Muscles and four for Crocodilehead) and a background image.

While he slept that night, I scanned in all of his sprites and started resizing/animating them.

He critiqued my work in the morning suggesting the Crocodilehead should not puke blood on people when attacking (you can still see a bit of the residue in the game now) and that Mr. Muscles should not shoot fire out of his hands when doing the megapunch.

After that it was mostly just tweaking and farting around in photoshop.

He got a good look at the code this time around and has a pretty solid base understanding of the relationship between files, images, servers and browsers thanks to a web page we built together a few months ago: http://audenneedham.com/volcanoes/ (he wireframed that one, wrote the content, selected and helped to resize the images, did the Wikipedia searches for pages to link to and helped to edit the HTML...)

Nothing too hairy for a 4-y-o:

1) identify interest (which it sounds like you have)

2) find a platform (a friend recommended http://gamequery.onaluf.org/ for our next attempt)

3) brainstorm

4) draw

5) fiddle

[bambax]

I'm wondering if you're from a different species.

My elder son is 6 and can't read, draw, or, God forbid, understand "the relationship between files, images, servers and browsers".

He's far from stupid; he plays chess, and Angry Birds, and many other games. But this? At 4??

[codeslush]

Thanks for the response. re: "...wrote the content, ...., did the wikipedia searches...." --> my 4YO can't read or write! Damn HN, I always feel inadequate!

[ern]

No reason to feel inadequate. All kids are different, and they are not extensions of our egos. As a first-time parent, I am still trying to convince myself of this, but I am slowly beginning to believe it.

I was a very articulate 3 year old (I spent most of my time with much older children), but I turned out to be somewhat average when I started school (in the case of motor skills far below average), to the surprise of my parents, who thought I was a "genius" because I could parrot off huge amounts of random trivia, and tell engaging stories. My parents even had my IQ tested, and it wasn't particularly high overall. I still retain my trivia talent, but in the era of Google, whatever little value it once had is rapidly becoming worthless.

My 2.5 year old son is fairly quiet (but doesn't have any language issues - he says plenty, he is just cautious). My in-laws have the nasty habit of comparing him to his cousin who is the same age and is a great talker (her father is a used-car salesman, so that's not much of a surprise). I used to get very defensive, and point out the stuff he knows, and can do. Now I just let it wash over me.

A lot also has to do with environment. My son didn't know colors, shapes, alphabets, numbers and puzzles. I got an iPad, and he managed to learn these very quickly. My wife is a bit detached and unmotivated, so this was a stroke of luck. Would waiting a year or two till he started school have made a difference to him learning that stuff? I doubt it.

If your 9 year old can't read, I guess that's a problem. If your 4 year old can't read, who cares?

[kragen]

Not all four-year-olds are interested in reading and writing. That has nothing to do with your personal adequacy. Furthermore, it only has a minimal amount to do with their ultimate adequacy at reading and writing. Different kids learn things at different times.

[joelhooks]

I have 4 kids and they vary in the age at which they could read from 3.5 to 8.5.

[mneedham]

Shit, sorry! Wasn't my intent at all. Kids learn different things at different times and we've played to Auden's strengths in these areas. We push hard when there's obvious interest in anything specific.

Don't want to give the impression that he's spelling well or writing quickly :)

Our 2-y-o is an entirely different person with much much different development patterns.

[mneedham]

And for further reference, I'm not a developer. We didn't do anything significant in the code - mostly just reverse-engineering and tweaking.