Please: Advice on Which Language, What Software, etc. For Simple Project.

Have this idea to build a simple computer game for/with my children as an intro to computer programming.

I was a programmer more than 20 years ago, in Clipper with a bit of C and so on, database programming. So my skillsets are pretty useless for this task but at the same time I'm not a complete novice.

The game we're thinking of is pretty simple, very simple. Just shoot at a background and get points for where you hit mainly.

Along with 'getting points' a database table could be updated giving you special 'abilities' on the upside and on the downside meting out various 'punishments'.

More or less as simple as going around a board game landing on random squares, like Monopoly, and reading out what's happened to you.

The backgrounds could change, of course.

Nothing much more than that.

I'd probably be capable of implementing it in some clumsy way or other.. I'm vaguely thinking mapped images and video ram and sql tables and C ..... and I don't know what.... I'm just vaguely thinking because that's about all I can do nowadays.

If I did it that way it'd be messy and not very efficient, not a good example to put before the boys I think. It might not even ever work.

So I would like to ask for advice from people more modern than I with better knowledge and experience.

How would they advise me to go about this?

Just add one more thing - I've been thinking (vaguely again) about getting into Python as a reasonable place to start getting back into it all again... If that ties in with this project at all?