Quick Look: Game Builder Garage

Giant Bomb's Great Big Game Builder Garage Gets Bugs, Goes Bust

Nintendo is run by aliens, I swear

"Oh no, is this like when ants get inside your cable modem?"

Nice callback.

California not having AC standard in houses will always blow my mind. Good luck with that crazy heat Jeff!

Nintendo spun the terrible community features wheel and came up with the worst possible options again. I thought we'd moved past the Nintendo friend codes / third party site methods of exchange.

I don't know if Game Builder would have had some big Mario Maker like community out there building cool shit, but releasing it like this is basically a death sentence for the game long term. I get that you don't want a bunch of unfiltered nonsense going out to everyone, but there has to be some better solution than just throwing it out there with literally no way to share/find things in-game.

@deathpooky: I want to use it for academic research on kid game development and what they learn, etc. etc. This completely hampers my participants being able to share their work with each other and learn about concepts like playtesting and iteration. On a basic level, they won't even be able to share their games with their parents, if they're using our Switches.

Jeff: "I've got big balls."

And so do those platforms... why do they look like construction worker hats surfing on giant dicks?

I have this game and it seems way too simple. Character properties, game types, animations, objects are all so limited. It seems like you have have fun with some logic but I'm not immediately sold. I have only spent 3 hours in it but I'd say get dreams or even game maker. I'll stick with it in hopes for something to click.

Edit: Alice sounds familiar. Is she the Nintendo Land robot?

I love programming and I love games that let me play with logic, like Little Big Planet, Trials and Human Resource Machine. Even though I appreciate their intent, for anyone with even the most basic understanding of programming, this game's teletubby-style pacing is really off-putting. I feel like it's taken like half an hour to explain how to fucking press B to jump.

Person Man, Person Man

Hit on the head with a frying pan

Lives his life in a garbage can

Person man

Nintendo puts mouse support in this, but didn't in Mario Maker 2 when they could have and made creating levels on a TV infinitely better. I will forever be bitter towards them for throwing the game out there with less features than the first game and stopping support for the game a year later.

I hope this thing improves over time. I love game creation tools in game-form and I hope it'll continue to be a thing into the future. That said, we need Dreams on everything, cause god damn.. That should be the blueprint for how to make user generated content type games. It is close to infinitely better than all the other gameified game-creation tools out there. The flexibility and workflow, once you get used to it, is second to none. Steep initial hurdle just to get going, but once you do, dang doodle is it good. Add VR on top of that and you're just enveloped in the whole digital realm, able to manipulate it as you choose.

Giving people the ability to make games is awesome regardless of the finished product. I'll applaud Nintendo for giving this repeated tries over the years. Tons of people have found the joy of game creation because Nintendo likes to experiment. Just wish they liked to experiment with that new internet thing.

On one end this game is super cool from Nintendo - it is great they made this, a neat thing in their catalog. One the other, it always feels like early access and needs a lot more features and depth to be a worthwhile thing. Sure Mario Maker 2 has a lot more stuff overall than the first game, but the original was still well realized. Dreams might be almost too complex for its own good, but it is still pretty cool.

There's a jank factor to this I like, but as Jeff said if the tools don't have the capability to erase that and make something more substantial with some work, I don't see this game going to the great places of both Mario Makers and Dreams.

I'll give the community some more time to come up with some interesting stuff before I write this off entirely, but so far it doesn't seem possible to make a genuinely entertaining game in the same way that you can with Dreams if you're prepared to put in enough time and effort.

20 minutes in and I already can't stand the way this software holds you hand. Hand holding is annoying in general but the Nintendo way of doing it is the worst, having it explain to you what you have to do and then explain it again and then making you do it twice is just plain frustrating. I know it's for kids but kids are even better at understanding stuff like this after you explain it once.

I like the music though.

Why did Nintendo have Yoshi do the VO work for Bob? It seems like an odd directorial decision.

wow the superhot one was really impressive. the actual implementation of the slowdown effect is surprising

There was an option called add to game list over the creator ID when you started your you can't follow creators rant.

@beggary: And from my experience with it, I would say that MIT's Scratch is still a better intro game programming platform (or programming in general)... At least that is like real programming code but in blocks so they don't have to type. This is just some completely proprietary system and they can't really take that knowledge elseware except "to move a character, we have to wire up 'button' to 'person'."

@el_blarfo: A good ode to Psycho Dad.

Labo lives on.

As Nintendo's continued forays in to UGC, live services, and the internet in general continues, I propose that we change our frequent commentary that "Nintendo doesn't understand the internet," to "Nintendo hates the internet, even the credit-card-charging part."

I have to believe that even for this toolset, that "Garaganoid" version of Arkanoid/Breakout isn't great. There has to be a better way to implement Breakout-style richochets instead of the super janky way gravity worked in that.

Seems real neat, but Nintendo is just going to delete all our levels in 5 years like last time, right?

@carnage1290: I'm really confused about the AC situation in Cali as well. Is it a government-mandated thing? If so, then either vote against that shit or move. If not, then you have 2 options:

1) Buy an AC unit.

2) Stop goddamn whining about the heat.

Seems like an interesting tool to learn very basic game making. Like a good stepping stone to more powerful and complex tools. And thats about it.

I love that goomba model

@robbiesevenfold: Yeah, I was thinking if Jeff does want to stream some game-making, I'd be much more interested in seeing him do it in Dreams than this.

The ways in which Mario can kill.

I wonder how well a thing like this performs. Like i can see why Nintendo would want to make this, and i can see parents buying this for their kids to give them that initial experience of creating a game for themselves and being proud of it.

But like, this is extremely on rails and requires a ton of reading and following the exact steps without any room for personal touches. Will a kid stick with this for more than 5 hours? I always considered myself quite patient as a kid, but i don't think i would put in the time to get past the lessons.