It's been a fantasy of mine for some time to envision and program a "real" game. I've made a couple of games in the past including a Mario clone, Zario, for the TI-85 graphing calculator, and a whack-a-mole Flash game for a kids TV show, Taylor's Attic.
Lately, my 7-year-old daughter has been making games in Hopscotch, and we even built the beginnings of one that she designed, Word Names, in JavaScript. Note: If you load it on a phone or iPad, the letters are draggable. She lost interest pretty quickly in JavaScript, however, and has also hit a lot of the limitations of Hopscotch.
With the playdate device coming later this year, I've been inspired to dive a little deeper into learning how to create 2D games in hopes that I can have one ready when the device is released. Playdate supports both Lua and C, and their Lua API seems to be coming along nicely. In fact, it looks like it will share some similarities to LÖVE, a popular gaming framework for Lua. So, in the last few weeks, I've set about learning a few basic principles of game design using Lua and LÖVE as a base. It's been fun to learn something new and if you're interested in doing the same, here are the resources I've been using:
I'm hoping there will be more to show in the coming months!