Hi all,

A friend's daughter wants to make her own iOS game, and has storyboarded the entire thing already. It's a pretty simple 2D game, not much going on besides some interaction with potions and stuff, and now she'd like to put it together and publish on the iOS appstore. I'm trying to help her find a good game dev tool geared toward kids or *very* early beginners. DarkBASIC, GameMaker, GameSalad come to mind, but I'm thinking it might still be a little "heavy" for a 7yo.

Any suggestions?

-Graf

I help out with some Summer programs at the University of Utah where some of the programs are geared towards children of that age range. That program uses Scratch (http://scratch.mit.edu/). It is more designed to help a person learn basic programming skill and can be used to make a simple game. With that in mind, Game Maker and Game Salad are the somewhat the same (with some more advance features). Play around with any of the programs and decide which you think is best. All 3, imho, should be fine for a 7 year old to use especially with the drag and drop features.