It's basically a quiz of the concepts you just learned, and there are five different puzzles to solve that helped to cement them into my mind before they could be pushed out by something new. Test Your SkillsĪfter completing a lesson, which can run anywhere from 20 minutes to 80 or more minutes, Game Builder Garage requires you to finish a series of puzzles before you can unlock the next lesson. The lessons help out enormously in that regard. It took me a little while to force my brain to think of how my games' various components will appear in the play screen rather than the edit screen. The Nodons are great at giving you a visual representation of the game you’re building and the pieces and parts that make it work, but its edit screen is largely an abstraction. If you're expecting Super Mario Maker levels of what-you-see-is-what-you-get, you're going to be disappointed. It makes creating games much more accessible, but it's still no walk in the park. The lack of a requirement to learn the syntax and peculiarities of a coding language works in Game Builder Garage's favor. No muss, no fuss – and it only gets more complex and interesting from there. Check back on your game screen and now you can control your Person object's movement. Drop the L-Stick onto your screen and drag its left/right connection to the horizontal connector on the Person object. So you go back to the edit screen and call up Input Nodons. But that person is just standing there, looking charming, unable to do anything beyond its simple standing animation loop. A quick glance at your game in action and yup: there's a person. Here's a quick example of how the Nodons work: You place a Person object Nodon on your edit screen. That said, while you're arranging your Nodons and their flows, you're learning how games work under the hood, and that understanding can translate to game design beyond Game Builder Garage's interface. Instead, it teaches you how to build a game using a custom game engine. Of course, it's important to point out that Game Builder Garage is not going to directly teach you how to code anything outside of it. You'd spend a few hours inputting the code into whatever crappy home computer you had at the time, and if you managed to enter a thousand lines of BASIC so you could make your screen turn a bunch of different colors you’d also absorb some programming concepts without you even realizing it. It reminds me of old computer magazines, which often contained long programs in BASIC. For example, you connect two different inputs to your AND Nodon (say, a constant like the integer 1 and a constant 0 to the same AND Nodon creates a de facto OR). There's no OR operator, but its existence is implied through the connections of Nodons. There are also Nodons for operations like arithmetic and counting, as well as the Boolean operators AND and NOT. There are Object Nodons for simple things like boxes, cylinders, and spheres. Your host, Bob, walks you through the steps for each part, introducing you to the Nodons responsible for each bit of logic or subroutine. Each lesson grows increasingly complex, but at no time during any of the lessons did I ever feel lost or frustrated. Learning to program can be a daunting task, but Game Builder Garage's lessons are great at walking you through the steps required to build seven different types of games. (No, not because I don’t have friends! It’s just not out yet.) Simple Complexity When your games are finished, you can share them with friends, although I haven't been able to test this functionality. The engine is not without its limitations, naturally, but for the uninitiated, it's a great place to get started building real games. And while it’s fairly technical, Game Builder Garage just oozes charm from its smart, fun writing and a finely honed edge that only Nintendo could provide. Its programming system offers a visual representation of all sorts of programming concepts: comparisons, subroutines, and conditional statements, all of which are presented through little creatures known as Nodons.
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