Tools for Beginning Game Developers - Free Game Creation Tools
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Despite its power and complexity, the creativity tools bundled with Little Big Planet are by definition restricted to the game’s own engine. While the possibilities they offer are extremely broad, whatever you build with them must function according to the basic rules set up by the original development team. You couldn’t use them to create an entirely new game from the ground up.
Fortunately for those gifted with the creative ability to use them, free tools that do allow this are starting to become more widely available. One such is Scratch, which is a visual programming language and environment designed primarily to encourage children and young people to acquire programming skills. Scratch contains a large selection of objects and characters – called sprites, in the jargon of animation – along with stackable building blocks for a whole range of actions and behaviors.
In the right hands, these elements can be combined to stunning effect to build puzzles and strategy challenges, simple platform games and even adventure games. Take Cube World, for example. Despite the game’s rudimentary and angular graphical style, it has all the elements of a real platform game, such as running and jumping, flaming fire pits, dangerous-looking purple enemies, characters in distress to save, and a genuine mystery at the all-too-premature end, leaving you wanting more, as all good games should.
Cube World: less square than it appears
Scratch is designed to be simple to learn and use, and its success in achieving these aims is demonstrated by the number of people using the system. Popular games obtain thousands of views and hundreds of comments, and while the games themselves are often extremely simple, in many cases this only serves to illustrate the importance of gameplay over graphics.
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