To get something from Game Builder Garage, you need to be willing to learn-but if you want, you will find the education it provides the most valuable.
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Game Builder Garage is surprisingly complicated for Nintendo games. It can be overwhelming, difficult, and will certainly fall into frustration easily from time to time. But… that’s game design, isn’t it? When it comes to giving beginners an overview of the process of building a game in a fun and educational way, Game Builder Garage may be one of the best efforts to date.
The promise of learning from the Nintendo team to make games is certainly a very tempting promise, because who knows the medium better than the magicians there? These people made Mario.
In fact, Game Builder Garage did not disappear out of thin air. Thematically, it is a natural evolution of the user-created ideas expressed in Mario Maker. In fact, it is the direct successor of some of the tools experimented by Nintendo Labo. Labo features Toy-Con Garage, where you can use touch programming to bring your cardboard works to life through mini games. Toy-Con Garage’s visual style continues here, as the name suggests—but it’s deployed in a fully functional video game creation suite, and it feels like an answer to the dreams of Sony and the media.
However, Game Builder Garage feels more focused on creating rather than experiencing the work of others. It’s worth noting that there are no built-in sharing or discovery features in the game. On the contrary, the only way to download other people’s work is to track external posts about Cool Creation through content such as the #GameBuilderGarage tag on Twitter or GBG subreddit; from there you can extract the download code, and when the code is entered into the machine, you can play it Other people’s works. This seems to be a rather simple and fringe cynical way to prevent Nintendo from being responsible for the content of other people’s games-although it is a bit bad, it does not inhibit the experience too much-because it is really all about creation.
In fact, this is the case, Game Builder Garage does not even come with any sample games. Mario Maker comes with pre-built levels from Nintendo-there is nothing. Instead, there are seven tutorials, each with an escalating difficulty and complexity, and each tutorial will lead to a specific type and type of game designed by Nintendo.
You learn by doing-so if you want to play Nintendo’s demos to show the capabilities of Game Builder Garage at a basic level, you need to build them yourself. It’s a lot like assembling a Lego set. You can follow the step-by-step instructions, but as your understanding of the toolbox continues to deepen, you will slowly start to anticipate the next step with excitement. Until the end, you can’t get rid of the tutorials, Game Builder Garage encourages you to add a personal touch-but of course you can apply the lessons learned in each tutorial to your own creation, or use Nintendo’s game ideas to build more complex things Foundation.
If you follow the instructions and there is no problem, complete all seven lessons and the understanding check interactive quiz between them should be about ten hours of content, and then you can start to create your own game correctly.
The tool set you can use has a typical Nintendo style, and each element in the game has its own characteristics. For example, the reset button is a sad, frustrated soul that constantly wants to redo, while the action button is a bouncing, eager person who is eager to be hammered during the game. It’s not about learning and writing code, but about the connection between these different individuals, called Nodon in the game.
Each node (on) can be connected to other nodes, and when you have a working game, you end up with a spider web that looks puzzling-but if you follow the course and focus, you will Understand what each connection method is. Game Builder Garage is like an operator in a matrix; things on the screen are obviously nonsense at first, but after a while you will understand the real meaning. For a child with the right mindset, I can easily regard this game as a catalyst, a major life event that will allow them to learn to become a game developer. For an aspiring adult, there is enough depth to satisfy one’s curiosity and brain burden.
The work that these tools can accomplish is already impressive; 2D horizontal scrolling, 3D racing games, and even mature 3D platform games. Texture tools allow you to create detailed assets or just work under simpler constraints, and we have let people collectively build clones of classic games and original new ideas within a few days of release.
It’s true that the content provided here will never allow for in-depth creations or truly detailed PC tools like Dreams, but there is also a lot of complexity here-Nintnedo quietly admits this because it adds full keyboard and mouse support untimely . When you start to build and see things come together, Game Builder Garage feels as beneficial as they came.
However, it does feel that all of this is related to the building. The lack of sharing tools does somewhat undermine the impressive degree of kit creation—although at least there is the ability to share by downloading code. Even if you have not proven that you are a creator, there are many clever things to offer-you only need to put a computer or mobile phone next to your Switch to find them.
Game Builder Garage seems to want to show the feeling of making games in a simpler way. Sometimes it can even cause headaches. It is ruthlessly complicated. However, when it clicks, it is fun, magical, and incredibly rewarding.
The review code provided by the publisher. Test on normal Nintendo Switch (docking) and Switch Lite.
