One of the most wonderful elements of Nintendo’s Super Mario Maker titles, which give players the chance to build their own platformers, is that they provide a glimpse at how Nintendo thinks about game design. You get to see how every element matters, from the exact length of platforms, to the precise angle of Mario’s jump. It’s like going to a painting lesson with Picasso.
Game Builder Garage broadens the canvas offered by its predecessors by allowing users to construct pretty much any kind of game, from racers to 3D action adventures – all via a cute, powerful visual programming language. Here, the coding experience is represented on a graph paper screen, with each component, whether that’s objects, actions or outcomes, represented as anthropomorphised blocks named Nodons, that you can pick up, move around and link together to create programs. Want to be able to move a character on screen? Simply select a Person Nodon, then an “Input” Nodon and link them together. Each object has a series of properties, that can be switched on or off, making them, say, destructible, transparent and/or movable depending on their role in your masterpiece.
The wonderfully intuitive interface also makes it easy to change between different sorts of camera, whether you want to make a side-on 2D platformer or a 3D adventure; though your palette of object types is limited, it’s wide enough to allow for lots of different games and looks. Want to make a turnip farming game? Fine. Prefer a two-player UFO hunting sim? That’s okay too. Unlike PC-based visual programming tools such as MIT’s brilliant Scratch, you can’t import images or textures from other sources and then intricately remodel them, so you probably won’t be making a savagely, dark violent alien monster game with a leather-clad protagonist. But this is a Nintendo product after all.
Perhaps because of its wider scope, Game Builder Garage is more rigidly pedagogic than the Maker games. You’re encouraged to work through the lengthy tutorial, which teaches you how to make seven different games, from a basic single-screen game of tag, to a Super Mario 64-style 3D platformer; after every lesson, there is even a little test to make sure you weren’t just blasting through on autopilot. It sounds a bit strict, but then the checkpoint tests are little games in their own right, providing you with design puzzles that you solve via tools and methods you’ve just learned about, so the process is genuinely fun.
The only problem with the tutorial is that there’s rarely any allowance for player experimentation or customisation – you’re told exactly what to do and you do it, with all other options greyed out. There were lots of times I wanted to try a slightly different or even blatantly wrong option just to see what happened, but I wasn’t allowed, and it felt like a vital element of learning was missing.
Once you get into the free programming mode though, you have unlimited access to the full range of tools, and the possibilities expand as you gain experience. From setting scores and number parameters to calculating collision detection effects, you really do start getting an idea of how games are constructed, and how teeny, incremental changes can have big outcomes on gameplay feel. Anything you make can be shared with other Game Builder Garage owners via a unique code – we’re already seeing talented designers making their own versions of classic Nintendo titles such as Super Mario Kart.
Filled with lovely details, perfectly constructed and often genuinely funny, Game Builder Garage is another excellent Nintendo creative tool, which quietly teaches you why its games are so good. It’s a totally closed experience, so you only have access to the materials it provides, but that makes it safe for families, and forces you to be imaginative in how you employ (and break) the rules. You won’t learn how to code in C from playing this game, but you will begin to understand how games are designed and how the logic of a game program works. If these are things you want to know about, there is no better teacher than Nintendo.
