Game Builder Garage [Demo] -- 1. Programming 101

Channel:

YuuGiJoou

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Published on June 19, 2021 10:05:39 PM ● Video Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t2A-YO62K_0

Game:

Game Builder Garage (2021)

Duration: 6:58

332 views

5

Ignore the (wo)man behind the curtain!
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This "game" had my eye ever since it was rather unceremoniously shown off, announced, and left to release to predictably little fanfare not long after.

A clear spiritual cousin to the Labo software, just as those games were all about all manner of neat trickery to turn cardboard and other odds and ends into (extraordinarily!) viable input devices wrapped around the various sensors and sensitivities of the Joy-Con controllers... this does something similar for software design.

No, really. I'm being totally serious. It has a whimsical veneer and is trying SO hard to look like an all-ages friendly interface that's just playing it all by ear... but this is essentially straddling all the vital disciplines and intersections involved in... well... making a game!

No, it's not REALLY this simple. But the concept of making a flowchart full of conceptually abstracted representations of computational logic? That's software design! Actually putting down the code in neatly segmented blocks full of impassive walls of alphanumeric text peppered with off-label use of symbols is "programming" to most people, but the overarching art of planning out all the little pieces and how they fit together, THAT is the essence of what it means to actually ENGINEER any sufficiently complex piece of software.

And that's all games are! Really!

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You probably don't know this about me, and you presumably never needed to... but my primary training is in this kind of thing. And I find it absolutely NUTS that this "game" exists at all!

It's my fondest and most sincere wish that countless kids (and open-minded kids-at-heart!) might somehow end up poking this thing and being enthralled by the simple joy of the unsimple process of creation.

I mean, it worked for me... much to the apparent lack of effort to make it appeal specifically to me, I mean. The boys' club of tinkering with detail-obsessed little bits of utter nonsense and stringing them together, and then taking a step back to see what it was you'd made. (Or, most often, failed to make!)

That was my fondest idea of fun, by the way... most accessibly in the form factor of games that let you make games... or at least control enough of their content directly that you might as well be making a game. To the point that the art of creation was the game, and then unleashing these monstrosities upon others was the game within the game! ...looking out for other people's creations and seeing what you could discern from the results and how they managed to make it work was yet another layer of the caper.

And that's what happens. That's the inane technobabble that converts a wide-eyed youngster into a crazy person who talks to machines... and then they have the audacity to talk back, and it gets really annoying, let me tell you...

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Um, yes. Anyway. The Garage has the eminently good sense to frame the game making process from the vantage point of a gamer, rather than a creator.

That said... the real weak point here is going to be... the delivery. It's quite verbose. Whimsical as all get out, mind you, and I appreciate the heck out of it personally... but... you've got to hold people's interest in the most technical of times, not alienate them by dressing up your overblown explanations with even more pomp and circumstance that'll make them difficult to swallow.

Then again, maybe I'm being overly critical for nothing... if someone's already in for a penny (or less! there's a free demo!), they MIGHT be all the more willing to follow through further than I'm giving them credit for.

And, indeed, the interplay and juxtaposition of the technical wizardry by sandwiching it in between colorful demonstrations of game logic running in real time before you flip it back over and poke at its grotesque innards to see what makes it tick. Or what prevents it from ticking as expected, since a game that's NOT QUITE right is a rather compelling hook that those of us obsessive enough to want to fix will find immensely satisfying to find ourselves outfitted to put back together as it naturally "ought" to be.

And that's probably the strongest draw of the whole idea here: game design is held together by an intricate web of orderly and irritatingly detail-driven interrelated disciplines... but the key ingredient that makes it tick... that makes games, well... games at all, rather than some rote mechanical or computational exercise... is the fact that they're intuitive and interactive. You can trace their internal workings and logic because they are made to be fun. People like fun! People want there to be fun, and they want to make fun-looking things fun in fun ways!

I mean, in theory. There's also the huge majority of user-generated and curated content that's just... not. Not for lack of trying, mind you, but because the capacity to accurately discern the true nature of fun is an elusive mayfly indeed.

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