Sorry your having Robotron issues as its one of the best 7800 games. still have yet to cross the 1 million point barrier. but got a dual edladdin controller just to play robotron
Also good to see you getting into Water Ski - Its a fun game bearing in mind its operating two characters using the joystick and buttons. Wonder if it could be hacked for two joysticks?
I would be happy to pay for an Atari 7800Basic course on Udemy. This course on Atari 2600 Assembler has been quite successful
https://www.udemy.com/share/101EUW/
Also understand that many students have probably paid just for the 6502 aspects but all the same. I would be happy to pay for a similar course on Atari 7800Basic that could get me to my first game
Just had to say. I got Gosub and think the octopus sprite is awesome...makes me thing you should do an underwater version of robotron ...scubatron ? using different colors of the octupus and others. Gosub is a great game!
Trouble is when we were all kids there were few distractions so if you were lucky to get a computer it was the center of your attention. How can you get a kid interested in building a game that moves a sprite around when they have VR on the PS4 for example....but there is a way.
The hit game Celeste for example was not created by a huge team. https://www.nintendo.com/games/detail/celeste-switch/
The game was developed over a weekend at a hackathon and using a virtual console with a built in programming language called Pico-8
The built in language is Lua which is kinda like basic or at least as easy to learn
The cool thing is you can load in games from the internet including the early version of Celeste then hit the escape key and wow you are now looking at the games source code.
The fun does not end there....instead of coding a new game why not hack celeste...have your kid work out how to change her color...how to change how high she can jump etc.
Very quickly your kid can see results which may hit the spark to think wow if I can modify this game can i learn enough to create my own...
Check it out at https://www.lexaloffle.com/pico-8.php
It is fun because you can get results quickly. There is a similar thing called smilebasic on Nintendo DS and Switch - https://nintendosoup.com/puchikon4-smilebasic-updated-on-switch/
I honestly think Pico-8 could be used to test game concepts prior to coding them up on Batari basic for example.
Thank you. Just like the 10 line idea, different language but fun to try same thing in Forth...can you write something fun in 10 lines of say 80 chars. Nothing like limited resources to get you thinking more