My Kid Wants to Make Video Games. What Should I Do?

TL;DR

If your kid wants to make video games and not only play them, that's a good sign. Builders pick the building modes in games and watch videos about how games are made. Roblox is a fine first step if they already build there, and Unity with C# is the better start if they want to release games anywhere or work in the industry one day. Most kids struggle to learn alone because nobody shows them what to learn next. I started in the Warcraft III World Editor at 14 and got my first industry job about six months after I started programming.

When I was 14, I played Warcraft III DotA almost every night. My mom thought I played way too much, and she told me so often. Most nights she turned off the internet before bed, and most nights I sneaked back once the house was quiet and turned the modem on again.

What she didn't see was that I wasn't only playing. DotA itself was a custom map that fans built in the World Editor, the map-making tool that came with Warcraft III, and I spent hours in that same editor building my own maps. My Tekken map and a short story map called Friends are still online today, and the versions of Tekken have been downloaded more than 10,000 times. I didn't know how to code back then, and there was nobody to guide me, so I could only go as far as the editor let me.

If your kid wants to make video games, they might be in that same spot right now. This article is what I would tell a parent in that position today, from where to start to whether it can become a career.

Is my kid a gamer or a builder?

Long before DotA, I was taking my toys apart to see how they were put together, and then putting them back together. I built shelters out of wood around our yard and sand castles whenever I found sand. I was always a builder, and the World Editor was the first tool that let me build inside the games I already loved.

Most kids who play a lot are simply gamers, and that's fine. A builder plays too, but you can usually spot the difference in where they spend their time:

• They pick the building modes. Minecraft in creative mode, Roblox Studio instead of only playing Roblox games, level editors and mods. If a game has a way to make things, they find it.
• They watch how games are made. Not only gameplay videos and streamers, but devlogs and videos where someone builds a game or a level from scratch.

If you see either of these, your kid isn't only playing. They're already trying to build, and what they're missing is the next tool and someone to show them how to use it.

Should my kid start with Roblox or Unity?

The World Editor was my Roblox. It was free, it came with a game I already played, and I could make something my friends could play the same evening. It was also a closed room: everything I built lived inside Warcraft III, and if I wanted to make something that wasn't a Warcraft map, I had to start over somewhere else.

Roblox Studio works the same way today. Kids write their games in Luau, Roblox's own version of the Lua programming language, and publish them to players who are already on Roblox. That makes it a great first step. The trade-off is that a Roblox game only runs inside the Roblox app. It can't be released as its own game on Steam or in the app stores.

Unity is the other path. It uses C#, a language that professional game developers use every day, and a Unity game can be released on PC, mobile and consoles. It asks more of a beginner up front, but what your kid learns there isn't tied to one platform. If you want the longer version, I wrote about whether Unity is still worth learning.

My advice is to follow what your kid is already excited about and not force it. If they already build in Roblox with friends their age, start there. If they talk about making "real" games, want to learn to code in C#, or think about game development as a job, start with Unity.

Can my kid learn game development on their own?

There are exceptions, but most of the time, no. Not because the learning is too hard. When I was a kid, learning was never the difficult part. Finding the right resources and knowing what to learn next was. The kids I knew who learned programming young usually had a parent who worked in tech, or a teacher at school who showed them how to learn. I had neither.

So I stopped making games. Somewhere along the way I decided that game development was for smart, gifted kids, and that I wasn't one of them. From 2013 I worked as a pixel artist, taking gigs for clients on Upwork, still close to games but not making them.

In 2015, in my early 20s, I finally started writing real code. I told myself that if I stayed consistent for one year, I would learn it. I had always been the kid who jumped from one shiny thing to the next, but programming stuck, and I kept at it for the whole year.

That year taught me it was never about being gifted. I was missing someone to guide me, not talent. If I'd had someone to teach me at 14, I would have been programming years earlier. I wrote more about what learning alone cost me in 10 Mistakes I Made Learning Unity Alone.

For a parent, that's the good news. Your kid doesn't need to be a genius, and you don't need to know how to code. What they need is someone who can show them the next step and answer the question they're stuck on before they give up. That's what I do with teens 13 to 17 in 1-on-1 game development lessons.

Can game development become a career?

After I decided to learn programming in 2015, I followed the most common advice at the time: stop only reading about it and start making games. I built an endless runner called Dodge Run, and then a sequel, Dodge Run 2. I already knew pixel art, so I could draw all the graphics myself, and the only new thing I had to learn was the code. Making those two games taught me the basics every programmer needs: conditionals, loops, methods and classes.

In February 2016, Dodge Run came out on Google Play, and the Croatian gaming site HCL.hr wrote about it. I released it under the name DarkBlack. Around the same time, about six months after I started programming, I got my first job in the industry. It didn't pay much, but it was honest work, and it got my foot in the door.

Today I'm a Unity developer and the founder of TOMICZ, a technology and AI development company. I've also built my own game engine, TOMICZ3D, and I'm making a game on it, Project DarkBlack, named after the same DarkBlack that released Dodge Run ten years ago. If you're worried that AI will take these jobs before your kid gets there, I wrote about why I think game development is AI-proof.

The small games your kid makes now are not a waste of time. Two small, finished games are what got me my first job.