Nintendo isn't new to this concept, either—the Mario Maker series and games like WarioWare DIY have given players robust creation tools to play with

Game Builder Garage hides powerful programming tools behind a cute interface

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2021-05-28 19:30:06

Nintendo isn't new to this concept, either—the Mario Maker series and games like WarioWare DIY have given players robust creation tools to play with. But Game Builder Garage is Nintendo's most ambitious effort yet to let its users make games, using a coding-free environment built for the Nintendo Switch.

The basic layout of Game Builder Garage will be familiar to anyone who has used visual programming tools Scratch or the Unreal Engine's Kismet environment. Instead of being built with lines of code, Garage games are made by placing and connecting little colored square beings called Nodons, which sit in the design space and distractingly blink their eyes at you every few seconds.

Every single thing in a Game Builder Garage game is represented by a Nodon, from the playfield/game screen to the player-character, the enemies, and invisible concepts like constants and variables. And everything about the game itself can be controlled by selecting a Nodon and tinkering with its inputs, outputs, and configuration—no actual lines of computer code are necessary.

To create an auto-scrolling 2D level, for instance, you can create a counter Nodon and connect it to the "X" coordinate of the "screen" Nodon, making the camera position shift to the right over time. If that configuration makes the screen move too fast, a "map" Nodon in the connection chain can set a limit on how quickly the counter counts up.