I highly recommend going to your local board game shop and looking for logic games, like tile placement games or long-term-planning games. There is one called “railroad ink” that essentially has you roll dice that show different bends/paths to draw, trying to connect locations via rail and roadway. It teaches the basic logical concepts that you’ll build off of to teach programming. After playing a few different games, you can use the concepts learned to describe the tools available to them to build a program. I know a few tile placement games are designed to literally teach the concept of script-building, UI design, and resource management as it relates to programming.

Edit: https://a.co/d/eht5t18

The trend has stopped for modern films, but tons of releases are retroactively showing how it could have been done. Games that capture the creative intent of great films really well like pretty much any of the Alien games from the last decade, those terminator and robocop ones, even Dead by Daylight directly invokes specific director’s visions on characters, scenes, and even campy acting.

All of which are not rushed and who’s scope have appropriately matched their budget.

Factorio feels way different even if it scratches the same itch. More structured with the grid system and lends itself to clean blueprint layouts for efficiency… Always more efficient… Always…

Idk if you’ve played Rimworld or Factorio but they scratch the same long-term-planning itch that Zomboid does.

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