Sissy's Magical Ponycorn Adventure: A Father Daughter Bonding Experience

Introduction - A Story About Togetherness via Programming

Have you ever worked on a programming project and lost motivation or given up on it entirely? That's not uncommon, in fact, most programmers could go on and on about all of the uncompleted projects that they've worked on over the years. It's easy to start something, but it's hard to go all the way through with it to completion. One inspirational story that I also come back to is a game that 5 year old Cassie Creighton and her father Ryan Creighton made in 2011.
Ryan and Cassie worked together to create Sissy's Magical Ponycorn Adventure. Sissy's Magical Ponycorn Adventure is a flash game that was programmed by Ryan, but designed, illustrated, voiced, etc., by 5 year old Cassie.

TOJam - A Programming Conference for all Skill Levels

Ryan and Cassie created this game together during TOJam, a three day game jam event where all participants must start and finish their games during the event. Game jams can be a pretty stressful and on edge environment, where teams of people frantically work and pull all-nighters in hopes to create the best game. Bringing a 5 year old to a Game jam to help is a nearly unheard of thing, but Ryan made it happen, and Cassie wanted to come! Ryan said the following about bringing Cassie to a game jam:

"Dragging your kid to a weekend-long game jam, eh? Before you call Children's Aid on me, please understand that i didn't actually keep Cassie captive at TOJam all weekend long. She came in with me at 9:30 Saturday morning, and was the most excited i've ever seen her. We'd been preparing her for MONTHS so that she'd be emotionally ready for TOJam. After the organizers expressed concern that my rotten kid would be running around the place pestering people and making noise (an entirely likely scenario, if you're familiar with my insane children and my lousy parenting style), i spent every evening coaching Cassie."

Needless to say, Ryan and his daughter got a lot of bonding time in during these three days while working on their game.

The Takeaway - The Joys of Programming

During the last day of the event, the whole family came to work on the project. Cassie had spent nearly 10 hours with her father on Saturday drawing pictures and voice acting the characters, and now it was time to scan everything in and piece the game together. One of the final pieces that they needed was the music for the game, so Cassie and Ryan's even younger daughter recorded a song on their toy drum and thumb harp that was put into the game as the main music. Before finalizing the game Ryan talked about how happy Cassie was about her creation:

"The game, while still unfinished, was set up in a hallway where Cassie excitedly ran up to any interested passers-by, snatched the mouse out of their hands, and said "I MADE THIS! LEMMIE SHOW YOU HOW TO PLAY!""

After some random playtesting, and a few final touches, the game was complete. Ryan and his family were pleased with the results of all the drawings, voices, story, characters, and so on and decided to turn in their game for the competition. All donations and ad revenue went to Cassies future, and that amount currently totals for $3200. With that said the most important takeaway for Ryan was the lesson learned and experience that everyone had:

"In all of this, our goal as parents is to give our kids the kind of childhood we would KILL to have had. i can't imagine how different my life would have been if i had made a real working video game with my father at age 5."

Conclusion

This story has always been motivational to me as both a programmer and as someone who would love to do something like this with their child someday. Magical Ponycorn Adventure is a flash game, which unfortunately is phased out and difficult to play these days. If you would like to see more on the game, there are plenty of videos playing through the 10 minute (or less) game start to finish!

References

To play: http://www.ponycorns.com/game.html

Ryan's POV: https://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/RyanCreighton/20110524/89539/5YearOld_Girl_Makes_Video_Game.php

Media Coverage: https://social-games.wonderhowto.com/news/5-year-old-video-game-designer-friggin-loves-ponycorns-0127956/