Scratch

Yeah, this boy is a strange one.  his father was letting him run around in WOW when he was 4.  he mostly liked to jump in the lava in IF and die.  The ONLY thing he will draw is battles between stick figures.  But he plays Wii nintendo games, not first person.  Just wants two cartoon characters to shoot flames at each other and one crumples.  Nothing gory.  He isnt spooked by things like his older (half) siblings were.

Without any help from me, other than showing him to the basic tutorial pdf and the videos, he created 2 sprites which, when you hit run, would each change back and forth between 'costumes' such that the dragon would breath fire and the stick figure with a wand in his hand would have a shield appear (ok, a line in front of him), and you would hear the words 'shield of justice!'.  Not bad for his first 30 minutes, I think. 

Math and logic (esp including gaming logic) is really his thing.  I honestly think he can get the concept of using variables if I walk him through it a few times.  and yes, his father's iq IS in the genius range . . i'm not making this stuff up . . . sigh

If he's into math and logic (like me), I really do suggest you put lots of it into any game you make together. It'll also help take some violence out of it 

I think you said you've done some programming before, you should be accustomed with variables. Just keep one thing in mind: Scratch is not a compile-and-run application, you can edit things 'on the go'. That makes a substantial difference in variables programming, as they can not only be changed by blocks but also by sliders, and they cannot be dynamically created (unfortunately).

Good luck!

You need to have variables to have health. You could make a health bar with various costumes though that changes costumes depending on how much a variable's value is. Then you can just hide the variable.

Yeah you may want to check out the wiki
I wrote a tutorial on how to make a turn based RPG

http://wiki.scratch.mit.edu/wiki/Turn-Based_RPG

I have also made a lot of projects that are intended to be demo projects that show the best ways to do things.

Hahah thats not so simple.  But still, i think i could use that enough to get something where maybe you click for the user to attack (and maybe for the enemy to attack) and have the hp drop by a random number, but using a smaller random range for the enemy's attacks, so the user will usually win.  That sounds to me like a good next step after he gets his sprites to look dead. 

You've got a lot of stats there!

You can, in fact, have HP without variables. But variables are so much more fun 

Anyway, you can use different costumes to represent a health bar or something (or numbers) and go to the next costume when they're hit. It's IMO more complicated than variables however.

And you know VBA? I love it... it's so simple    I used it back when I made OS simulations in PowerPoint.

Ok, any time you have a value, you should use a variable. HP is a variable no matter how you look at it and any use of it will require a variable of some sort, you can't really make any programs without variables and if statements.

A very simple RPG would be really easy to make, take this code for example.

// this denotes comments

green flag clicked
//set HP variables
set playerHP to 100
set enemyHP to 100
forever {
wait until (player attack button clicked=1)
change enemyHP by random (10 to 20)* -1
wait 1 second
change playerHP by random (10 to 20)* -1
if( playerHP<1 or enemyHP<1){
end}
}


//on the button
button clicked=1
wait 1 second
button clicked = 0


This is for a turn based RPG, other kinds are diffrent.