Nintendo’s Game Builder Garage Is Too Inaccessible and Closed Off to Be a Useful Tool

Most of my attempts at making games have been through other games. I bought a copy of WarioWare D.I.Y. on the DS to hone my design skills making small things. I purchased Super Mario Maker 2 and made one level that I have shared with no one. I’ve fiddled with game building tools in Warcraft 3 and Portal 2. I’ve spent a lot of time making little but none of it has really lasted. My skills have been lost to the changing games landscape and the frivolity of my own whim.
With this background, Game Builder Garage instantly caught my curiosity. Nintendo’s latest foray into accessible game making tools, Game Builder Garage is split between a set of interactive tutorials, helping you make things like a basic racing game or a small 3D platformer, and a free programming mode. You “code” by stringing together preprogrammed “nodons.” Attach a button press nodon to a person nodon to make it jump. Attach a number nodon to a car nodon to make the car accelerate. These relationships can stretch from the simple to the complex. However, the game makes it feel comfortable. Each nodon has a friendly personality and the game beeps, boops, and purrs as you thread its pieces together.
The intent is explicitly to help older kids understand the logic of coding. This means that the logic needed to, for example, create AI, is not intuitive. Well, at least it is not intuitive for me. This is not like Mario Maker, where enemies and characters have a prebuilt selection of behaviors to play around, or like Warioware D.I.Y., where the limited scope of the project makes the light programming straightforward. The possibility space is as wide as your problem solving skills. This means that you have to translate something as seemingly simple as making a car drive itself into numbers and bits.
However, this is far from a weakness; it’s actually one of the game’s core strengths. While Game Builder Garage’s duty is to simplify and streamline the messy process of coding, it leaves intact a lot of the core fundamentals. The structure of the tutorials reminded me of the dozens of computer science assignments I did in college. My favorite part of the game are the puzzling “checkpoints.” In between lessons, the game offers up little puzzles using what you learned from making the last game. It requires that you fiddle with minute variables. It is always a delight to discover that you do understand something beyond the walls of step by step instruction. Fittingly, a lot of the “play” is experimenting with multiple functions and seeing how they line up, interact, or mess up your intentions. AND and NOT functions even show up. While it is plainly not too robust, Game Builder Garage does create a readable way of coding a game. It’s easy to see how getting familiar with the toolset here would let you make something elsewhere, with different tools.