Thanks. My son has been asking me how to write games, and has spent some time looking around in the code for the Raspberry Pi version of Minecraft. Maybe we can make some headway in this version because even dumb old Dad can handle 500 lines.
I've created a tutorial for making a 2D version of Minecraft using Python and Pygame. Obviously the end result is a _much_ simpler game than Minecraft, but it is useful in teaching things like 2D arrays and dictionaries.
HTML5 games! They're easy, quick to set up, the feedback is instant and they're fun to play! I've been making HTML5 games as part of short, two hour collaborative coding exercises at work and it's awesome. Here's a recent one we did based on Flappy Bird [1].
I made a few bootstrap scripts here [2] to make it easier to get up and running.
My wife recently began learning python with the book "Hello Python." It seems like a solid intro from what I read. The book uses hunt the wumpus as its starting example. If you combine that with Steve Johnson's excellent Pyglet tutorial[1] you could probably get to writing games pretty quick.
