I am looking to give my son a better taste at game development that he can expand upon as he learns programming. He has spent over a year playing around with things like Pivot, Morrowind and Oblivion construction sets, and a freeware click-and-drag 2-D game maker. With Oblivion, he is quite good at developing dungeons and has been learning its scripting. I can see him using the TBD engine to play around with simple physics, doing rule-based animations and eventually building an avatar that hacks up another avatar resulting in a variety of bizarre death animations. He is fairly artistic and is interested in mesh generation, textures and such so it is time for him to start putting together pieces beyond click-and-drag. I have been a professional real-time programmer, algorithm developer, adaptive control theory developer... for over 15 years so I can provide some good guidance. I just don't know the tools of the game developer trade. Having browsed here and other forums, I am zeroing in on 3d Game Studio and DX Studio with about a $150 budget to run on higher-end Vista (32-bit) PC. I have started the process of downloading the trials to see for myself what would work. The write-ups for 3d Game Studio are intriguing in that they advertise the flexibility to get a novice started but the complexity to allow an experienced programmer get at the guts. Desirable features I forsee him needing include level/world editors, a library of models/textures/objects, pre-packaged behavior scripts, and pre-packaged game systems (e.g. a combat system) that he can build upon as he learns more. 2D and 3D (1st & 3rd person) are desirable. In addition to the tools, are there and good books to get him going? I would appreciate any feedback I can get! Thanks!

I don't know Unity, but UDK is likely to be pretty overwhelming for a 12 year old, maybe a slow introduction to it (do some mods first?)

Played a few games using unity. Some looked pretty basic when it comes to geometry, and the other ones look pretty complicated. Recently they added a terrain editor that sports pretty complicated scenery.

Thanks for the responses!

I will check into Unity and UDK.

From a 12-year-old perspective, I think the blank editor that launches with 3D Game Studio may be more intimidating than the complex UDK world editor that pops up on launch. It's a difference between no information and an excess of information.

BlitxMAX, its a wonderful language, it reads like BASIC, but its specifically designed for games and has good advanced features if you want them. I loved the program, it helped me learn alot about how a game is put together without needing to trudge through c++ and API's. It handles sound and input and everythign you need to get going fast.