That's one of the things I've been doing with my son, is trying to show him a cool thing that seems too advanced for him, and show him that it's only a small step up from where he is
Right on! One of the most valuable skills I've learned over the past several years, is how to decompose your projects into small pieces, then decompose those things into even smaller bits and keep going until the pieces seem downright stupid. That last part is the key. You have to keep going until you'd feel insulted if someone asked if you could do those things. This sounds bad, but it's actually a very powerful mental tool.
Let's say you want to build an MMO. That's a really huge, complex chunk of work. So let's just take a piece of that, let's say the networking part. That's still really huge, so let's just take a piece of that, like the part that synchronizes the client's ship position. That's still quite big, so let's just make something that can send some kind of data between some clients and a server. Well, it turns out there are a bunch of tutorials online for building a Websockets chat server, so let's just start with going through one of those.
Then, when you can send/receive data, write a game loop simulation of an Asteroids ship, and build it into the server. Then, for a client, forget about networking altogether and go through a Javascript Asteroids tutorial. Next, sync those two in the stupidest way possible. Then, when that's working, make your sync just a bit smarter. Rinse and repeat. This is actually how I started building my game server.
(You can see a sort of reverse chronological order of this process here:
Right on! One of the most valuable skills I've learned over the past several years, is how to decompose your projects into small pieces, then decompose those things into even smaller bits and keep going until the pieces seem downright stupid. That last part is the key. You have to keep going until you'd feel insulted if someone asked if you could do those things. This sounds bad, but it's actually a very powerful mental tool.
Let's say you want to build an MMO. That's a really huge, complex chunk of work. So let's just take a piece of that, let's say the networking part. That's still really huge, so let's just take a piece of that, like the part that synchronizes the client's ship position. That's still quite big, so let's just make something that can send some kind of data between some clients and a server. Well, it turns out there are a bunch of tutorials online for building a Websockets chat server, so let's just start with going through one of those.
Then, when you can send/receive data, write a game loop simulation of an Asteroids ship, and build it into the server. Then, for a client, forget about networking altogether and go through a Javascript Asteroids tutorial. Next, sync those two in the stupidest way possible. Then, when that's working, make your sync just a bit smarter. Rinse and repeat. This is actually how I started building my game server.
(You can see a sort of reverse chronological order of this process here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7x2uQjLtXkY&list=PLnAL8xf0QQ... )