These rules have been very helpful to me the last few years. I had to cobble them together the hard way—with lots of frustration, hurt feelings, and sub-par solutions left in my wake. I hope you can avoid all that and, along with a group you trust, find the best ways past all your problems.
Roy O. Disney was just as much a part of Disney's success as Walt, but while many people have molded themselves in Walt's image, the Roys are few and far between.
Weird timing to be praising Elon Musk's propensity to care deeply (for future internet readers, he recently gave a nazi salute during a Donald Trump rally).
Netflix IPs would make some great worlds for larger games, actually. I can imagine a Telltale-style narrative adventure set in the Womens Prison of 'Orange is the New Black' or an action horror game where you play as Eleven, trapped in the Upside Down. Even their animated properties - Knights of Sidonia, Ajin, and Voltron - would be awesome worlds for players to experience. Netflix, if you're reading, hit up the game studio I design for -- [email protected]
I think there needs to be a moratorium on that AirBnB political cereal box story. "The most important thing to do is to focus on your business, but also it's cool if you spend time on a random side business," is a big mixed message.
Yes, I find that to be the case more often than not: boys don't care about the gender of their avatar. Girls do.
Codemancer has variables and conditionals, and uses them for various things. Some of the game is very tactical, so conditionals are used to deal with enemies who have semi-random behaviour. There are also levels that take place "in the dark" (with a limited field of view).
Yes, "code your way to the target" games have become somewhat of a genre. I think the story is one source of differentiation, as is the programming interface -- Codemancer has no numbers greater than 5 (arithmetic is mod 6), to keep the game from getting math-heavy. All the functions are symbolic, so there's no reading required.
In Codemancer user-defined functions are "pages" in your spell book. Players can call other pages, and even the page they're on (this is much later in the game). You can also Cast a page onto an enemy who has been weakened. We've seen that kids are pretty comfortable with the idiom of "Pages."
If you find this essay compelling, you might be interested in the game I'm working on, Codemancer ( http://codemancergame.com/ ). A game that teaches programming, with a compelling story about a girl on a journey to rescue her Father. Coming this Fall to Mac, PC and Tablets.
I tried to hew closely to the principles of Constructionism which were pioneered by Papert, and to make the game accessible to kids who wouldn't normally be interested in programming.