Comment by datakan
1 month ago
That's kinda what I feel like telling him. He has a lot of passion and he's a very smart kid. I don't want to crush that, I want to nurture it. I think being real about things is important though and he has a lot of years still to ultimately decide.
I think you're doing right by giving him AI. But get him a coding harness - that's where the real traction is right now. Claude Code or Codex.
I say this because - the joy of making games is mostly in the design. The imagination it takes to create a new world. I use AIs to create these worlds for me, from MY imagination, and they are extremely useful for that.
One lesson that could be applicable, is that your passion doesn't necessarily have to be your "job". You can perform music on the weekends, or be an active participant in your local indie dev gamer community while having a totally boring corporate job. I've seen a lot of people burned by trying to make their passion their actual career.
This is, in fact, what my kid is planning. They are artistically inclined - make beautiful art - but when looking at colleges focused on law.
Why? Because lawyers make bank, and they can fund their passion that way. Not the way I did it, but... who knows?
Don't sweat it. Everyone wants to write games at that age. I wanted to write games at 13, I was taking part in an open source game project at 15. Kid's interests in what kind of things they want to make do widen over time.