I'm making a beginner-friendly 2D game programming language for online games. This month I added stencils, which limit rendering to particular shapes, and can be used for scene transitions but also some other cool effects like fog-of-war. One day I hope to see thousands of teenagers learning to code with Easel!
I’ve got a Discord from my previous game of about 2000 people, mostly teenagers, and my testers have mostly come from there. To name one example, just yesterday a teenager completed a chess game after 3-4 weeks on Easel. I’ve been incorporating tons of feedback from the testers over the past year and a half.
I think that it may look strange to a person who has coded before because the language is semi-declarative. Most teenagers come to Easel as players with no prior programming experience, and begin by remixing their favourite game, and that’s when the semi-declarative model really shines. Many interesting changes can be done in a single edit because the code is clumped together in a hierarchy. Whereas in another programming language there may be more indirection and you might need to edit 3 separate parts in different files to make 1 change, and people who haven’t coded before don’t know how to find all the parts. I think Easel works for players becoming makers but can feel strange for people who come from other languages.
It is very interesting though! I have been interested in this kind of language design for interactive UI for a while. If there was a quick article outlining how all the "with" and "on" and "own" work to more experienced developers using references to existing language features, I'd love to read it. Right now it reminds me of the declarative style of qt ui and online primitives introduced in godot, but i haven't looked at it in more details. Also love your take on async. Wish you all the best luck, this seems like a really thought through language design!
This is a very kind comment, thank you! Yes it has been a LOT of iteration to make the language what it is. I think it would make sense to have a page for experienced developers to better understand what Easel is. Right now maybe the closest is this page: https://easel.games/docs/learn/key-concepts
I'm making a beginner-friendly 2D game programming language for online games. This month I added stencils, which limit rendering to particular shapes, and can be used for scene transitions but also some other cool effects like fog-of-war. One day I hope to see thousands of teenagers learning to code with Easel!
How are you currently retrieving feedback on the language design? Have you worked with teenagers and parents on it?
I went through the demo on the first page and found it quite complex (but then I am stuck in existing patterns of course).
I’ve got a Discord from my previous game of about 2000 people, mostly teenagers, and my testers have mostly come from there. To name one example, just yesterday a teenager completed a chess game after 3-4 weeks on Easel. I’ve been incorporating tons of feedback from the testers over the past year and a half.
I think that it may look strange to a person who has coded before because the language is semi-declarative. Most teenagers come to Easel as players with no prior programming experience, and begin by remixing their favourite game, and that’s when the semi-declarative model really shines. Many interesting changes can be done in a single edit because the code is clumped together in a hierarchy. Whereas in another programming language there may be more indirection and you might need to edit 3 separate parts in different files to make 1 change, and people who haven’t coded before don’t know how to find all the parts. I think Easel works for players becoming makers but can feel strange for people who come from other languages.
It is very interesting though! I have been interested in this kind of language design for interactive UI for a while. If there was a quick article outlining how all the "with" and "on" and "own" work to more experienced developers using references to existing language features, I'd love to read it. Right now it reminds me of the declarative style of qt ui and online primitives introduced in godot, but i haven't looked at it in more details. Also love your take on async. Wish you all the best luck, this seems like a really thought through language design!
This is a very kind comment, thank you! Yes it has been a LOT of iteration to make the language what it is. I think it would make sense to have a page for experienced developers to better understand what Easel is. Right now maybe the closest is this page: https://easel.games/docs/learn/key-concepts
Thanks again for your kind words!