How Should a Teen Start Making Their First Game?

Last updated: October 2026

If you are working out how to start making a game with a teenager, the order they build things in matters more than the tool. Still, the tool question has a clear answer for most families. If your teen has never written code, start in Scratch, even at 14. If they have some code behind them and want a real engine, pick Godot, which is free and open source. If they already code and want to build something ambitious quickly, an AI coding agent works well, on a subscription you own, with you in the loop. Whichever tool they pick, the first thing to build is not a level, and most of this post is about what it should be instead.

Table of Contents

• How I tested this
• If your teen has never written a line of code
• If your teen has outgrown Scratch and wants a real engine
• If your teen already codes and wants to build something big
• If your teen is not sure they will stick with it
• The numbers side by side
• Whichever tool: build the systems before the levels
• What I tell my students
• Frequently Asked Questions

How I tested this

This is not a lab benchmark. It is the pattern I see when families bring me a teenager who wants to make games, and it draws on three kinds of lesson I have taught: first games in Scratch, game engine work with earlier students, and, over recent months, a teenage student building a game with an AI coding agent. The build-order advice later in the post comes from that last student's lessons.

My bias, stated plainly: my curriculum runs from Scratch to Python to building with AI tools, so two of the three routes below are what I teach. Godot is the engine I point teens toward when they want a dedicated one. Every fact about cost, licence and platforms comes from the tool's official site, checked in late September 2026, not from memory.

What I am not doing here is ranking engines against each other. There are several good ones. This post answers a narrower question: where should your particular teenager start?

If your teen has never written a line of code

Parents of teenagers often assume Scratch is for little kids. It is not. Scratch's own about page says it is designed especially for ages 8 to 16, and it is provided free of charge. A 14-year-old who has never coded will get through the beginner material fast, and that speed is the point.

What a first-time teen needs is not a professional tool. They need the core ideas of programming without syntax errors in the way: loops, conditions, variables, events, and what happens when two things touch. Scratch gives them all of that with blocks that cannot be typed wrong. A teen who spends their first month fighting semicolons and missing brackets often decides they are "not a coding person" before they have learned a single idea.

The objection I hear from teens themselves is that Scratch looks babyish. The answer is the project, not the tool. A platformer with gravity, jumping and collision is a real piece of game logic, and my step-by-step Scratch platformer tutorial produces a genuinely playable game. Nobody who has made a character jump and land cleanly on a platform thinks it was a toy.

The limit is real, though. Most teens outgrow Scratch quickly, and that is fine. The concepts transfer. The tool is a first step, not a home.

Verdict: Scratch, because a first game should teach the ideas of programming, not the quirks of a tool.

If your teen has outgrown Scratch and wants a real engine

This is the teen who has finished a few Scratch games, or done some Python, and now wants something that looks and feels like the tools professionals use. Here I recommend Godot.

The facts, from Godot's own site. It describes itself as "your free, open-source game engine" for 2D and 3D games, and says you can deploy to desktop, mobile and the web. It is released under the permissive MIT licence, and the licence page is unusually clear for a family: "You are free to use Godot Engine, for any purpose," its licence terms "do not apply to the content you create with it," and the people who make a game "will be their sole copyright owner(s)." For a teenager making a first game, that means nothing to pay and no strings attached to what they make.

There is a second reason I like it for this stage. Godot's main scripting language, GDScript, uses an indentation-based syntax similar to languages like Python, though the same page is careful to say it is entirely independent from Python. A teen who has met Python will find the code on screen familiar. If you are still deciding whether your teen is ready for typed code at all, my guide on when kids should switch from Scratch to Python covers the signs.

The limitation is the editor. A real engine has real concepts before anything moves. Godot's official step-by-step series spends its opening lessons on nodes, scenes and instances before it reaches the first script. A teen who expects to have a character running around in the first hour will be disappointed, and a teen who is warned about that in advance usually is not.

Verdict: Godot, because it is a real engine that costs nothing and its scripting will feel familiar to a teen who has met Python.

If your teen already codes and wants to build something big

Some teenagers arrive with a game already half-designed in their head and enough coding to read what a tool produces. For them, an AI coding agent is now a serious option. They describe what they want in plain language, the agent writes the code, and they test, correct and direct. A big idea can become something playable far faster than if they typed every line themselves.

The setup matters more than the tool. Anthropic's consumer terms say users of Claude must be at least 18. In my lessons, the parent owns the subscription and the teen works on it with the parent's knowledge. I do not set teenagers up with accounts of their own. On cost, Claude's pricing page listed the Pro plan at $20 a month billed monthly (or $17 a month on an annual plan) when I checked in late September 2026, with Claude Code, the coding agent, included in Pro.

The strength is speed. The weakness is also speed. An agent will cheerfully build whatever it is asked for, in whatever order, including forty items and three levels before the game has a working core. A human in the loop, whether a parent, a tutor or the teen on a good day, has to keep the build order honest. That is exactly what the rest of this post is about.

It also changes what the teen learns. Less of the lesson is typing code, and more of it is specifying precisely, reading what came back, and deciding what to build next. Those are real skills, and I set out the six habits that separate teen builders in a separate post. They are not a replacement for understanding code, and the teens who do best with an agent are the ones who can read what it wrote.

Verdict: an AI coding agent, on a subscription you own, because it turns a teen's ideas into something playable fast, as long as someone keeps the build order honest.

If your teen is not sure they will stick with it

In my experience this is the most common situation, and the one where parents spend money too early.

If you do not yet know whether your teen will still care about making games in two months, start with a free tool. Scratch is free, and so is Godot. Pick whichever matches their experience from the sections above, and set one small goal: finish a game. Not a big one. A game with a start, a way to win or lose, and an ending.

Finishing is the signal. A teen who finishes one small game and immediately starts sketching the next one is ready for more: a real engine, a tutor, or an AI subscription you own. A teen who drifts off halfway has told you something too, and it cost you nothing to learn it.

Verdict: whichever free tool fits their experience, because finishing one small game tells you more than any purchase will.

The numbers side by side

Tool	Best starting age band	What it teaches	Cost (checked September 2026)	Main limitation
Scratch	Designed for 8 to 16; right for any teen who has never coded	Loops, conditions, variables and events, with no syntax to trip over	Free	Teens outgrow it quickly
Godot	Teens with some Scratch or Python behind them	A real engine: nodes, scenes, and a Python-like scripting language	Free and open source, MIT licence	Editor concepts to learn before anything moves
AI coding agent (for example Claude Code)	Teens who can already read some code, on a parent-owned subscription	Specifying precisely, reviewing output, deciding build order	Claude Pro, $20 a month billed monthly	Claude's terms require users to be 18 or over; builds content before systems if nobody steers

The age bands for Godot and the AI agent are my judgment from teaching, not the tools' own rules, apart from the 18-or-over line in Claude's terms.

Whichever tool: build the systems before the levels

Here is the mistake almost every young game maker makes, in every tool. They start with content: the first level, a big map, a long list of items, a cast of characters. Weeks later there is a lot of stuff and very little game.

The fix I teach is what I call the alpha build. Before any levels, maps or long lists of items, a game needs four things:

1. Story and vibe. A direction, not a script. What kind of world is this, and how should it feel?
2. Core mechanics. The verbs: walk, sprint, dodge, dash. Whatever the player does most.
3. Core interactions. The systems the player uses to touch the world: the dialogue mechanic (not every conversation, just the ability to have one), items on the ground, a chest to open, combat if there is any.
4. Core UI. A bare main menu and a settings screen. They do not need to work yet.

Why this order works: once the systems exist, each addition suggests the next. An inventory item suggests someone to give it to, which suggests a conversation, which the dialogue system is already there to hold. Content built before the systems has nothing to attach to.

The analogy that finally landed with my student was the jump. You cannot sensibly place a single ledge in a level until you know how far the player can jump, because every gap is designed around that number. Build the jump first, and the levels have something to be designed around. Build the levels first, and every change to the jump breaks them. That student had been pulled back from content-first three times before this framing stuck.

The second half of the lesson came from the same build: every item is a mechanic. Each item you add to a game commits you to a system behind it. A flashlight needs dark areas. An item that helps you breathe needs rooms where you cannot. A pair of shoes that makes you faster needs a movement-speed system. Item design is scope commitment, and it balloons fast. Once that sank in, the student concluded, unprompted: "maybe we should just do a flashlight then." That sentence is worth more than any scoping lecture I could give.

The framework looks the same in each tool. In Scratch, core mechanics are the movement scripts on the player sprite. In Godot, they are the player scene and its script. With an AI agent, it means asking for these four things first, in this order, and saying no to levels until they exist.

What I tell my students

For a teen starting from zero, I say Scratch, and I say it even when they roll their eyes. In my experience the eye-rolling stops once they have built something that moves properly, and when Scratch starts to feel small, that is the moment to move them on. For a teen with some Python, the choice between Godot and an AI agent comes down to what they want to learn: the engine route teaches how games are built, and the agent route teaches how to direct a build. Both are real.

The case where I recommend against all three is the teen who wants to start with the dream game: open world, multiplayer, a hundred items. In any tool, that project is where first-time makers go to stall. I ask them to park it, keep a page of notes on it, and make something tiny first. The dream game gets better for the wait, because by the time they return to it they know what a system is.

Parents sometimes ask me whether game-making is a sensible way into coding at all. That is a different question, and I answered it in should kids learn game development first. This post assumes the answer is yes and deals with where to begin. Katie, a parent whose son learned Python with me, wrote that she would recommend me "to anyone wanting to learn programming the right way." For a first game, the right way is mostly about order: ideas before tools, systems before content, one finished small game before one unfinished big one.

Frequently Asked Questions

How should a teen with no coding experience start making a game? In Scratch. It is designed for ages 8 to 16, it is free, and it teaches loops, conditions, variables and events without syntax errors getting in the way. Most teens move through it quickly, and the concepts carry over to whatever comes next.

Is Godot free for a teenager to use? Yes. Godot describes itself as free and open source, and it is released under the MIT licence. Its licence page says the licence terms do not apply to the content you create with it, and that the people who make a game are its sole copyright owners.

Can my teen use an AI coding agent to make a game? Check the tool's own age rules first. Anthropic's consumer terms say Claude users must be at least 18. In my lessons, the parent owns the subscription and the teen works on it with the parent's knowledge. The teen still needs someone to keep the build order honest, because the agent will build anything it is asked for, in any order.

What should a teen's first game be? Something small that can be finished: a start, one core mechanic, a way to win or lose, and an ending. Before any levels, build the four systems: story and vibe, core mechanics, core interactions and a bare menu. Content comes after.

Is Scratch too babyish for a 14-year-old? Not if the project is right. A platformer with gravity and collision, or a game with a real scoring system, is genuine game logic. Most teens only need Scratch for a short while before they are ready for Godot or Python, and that short while saves them months of fighting syntax.

Choosing the starting tool is usually a fifteen-minute conversation once I know what a teen has already built and what they want to make. If you would like that conversation for your teen, book a free Discovery Call.