Next up, another gem you particularly loved that I never got close to finishing: Final Fantasy Tactics. I hear it's all about the ... uh, spear people. (Lancers?)

It took me a while to get to it because I just couldn’t wait till Skyrim’s release to get my hands on it and got a QA position on the project. Hopefully the long hours will pay off for everyone’s Dragonborn experience.

I'm really interested in the programming department at Bethesda Studio, and I hope you don't mind shedding some more lights for me :)

As for November, well, it'll be here before you know it. It certainly feels like it's fast approaching to me...

ps. Please make November 11 arrive sooner, I can’t wait to explore Skyrim.

My hope will be that he finds some of these little turns on his own and he takes them and runs with them if he's interested. He definitely had the little spark of pleasure of learning things that are fundamental (shift is division), so I'm hopeful that he'll also have the pleasure of finding things out.

@Doug I'm lucky to have kids who are interested in what I do at work all day (or at least, what they *imagine* I do at work all day), but I would be amazingly proud of whatever they achieved in whatever interests they pursue :)

@Alex I started with Basic, too, and moved to assembly and a dialect of Forth available for the Apple II at the time; my first games were text adventures and text-based racing (and skiing, that sort of thing) games.

I am approaching all questions of design and how to do things with questions, rather than answers. "You'd like to make a baseball game? Tell me more." It's his project; I'm trying to teach him the basics of what's going on in that computer he's working on, the basics behind computer "science", that sort of thing. General advice is fine. The only thing I've cautioned him about is scale -- I explained that the games we play on the 360 or the PS3 take literally hundreds of years of effort (100 people for three years, say) -- this is particularly because he's learning to code at the same time as he is writing his first games. I think it's likely that when he first runs a working program that he wrote from scratch, he'll be hooked, just like I was and continue to be 30 or so years later.

Another interesting/portable project you may want to look at is Hackety Hack.

http://hackety-hack.com/

I was really impressed with its progress last time I checked it out, but don't know how much it's stagnated since _why's disappearance. :-(

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_the_lucky_stiff

The very first program I shared with another person was a console-based quiz game with questions based on my social studies book. With a teacher and a couple extra years under his belt, you might be able to guide him through setting up a GUI. The logic is really simple: RNG, a switch statement, matching multiple choice input, and keeping score.

For sure, though, let it be his project, and not your project with his input. He's not too young at all!

@Aras I wish I had it then too. There were inevitably discussions of how all data is stored as zeros and ones, but he hasn't yet asked if that is also true of programs. We will get there if we end up discussing how it is that his Javascript program is running in a browser. :)