Game Builder: Create 3D games with friends, no experience required

i think your giving it too much credit, this seems like a side project by some aspiring game developer at google,

Anyone for Roblox :)

Some of this is the penetration of G Suite and cheap Chromebooks into the education market. Its more or less the same play that Apple used back in the 1980's and 1990's.

Seems she can implement cards using javacript.

> Hopefully it keeps chugging along for some time

That's my biggest question, especially with Google. Meanwhile, Kodu is still getting updates 10 years later! [0] (Disclosure: I was an intern on Kodu years back, so I'm probably biased ;) )

[0] https://www.kodugamelab.com/archive/new-kodu-release-15470/

That's where you need to build up the fundamentals that you've learned. I'm excited to see what people are going to build with this once they've gotten comfortable with the engine. Creativity will be the limit!

Being able to write some code to make a custom block and then just drop it right into the world, working the same for everyone else, is pretty cool. Hopefully that is how it works.

Klick & Play?

Games factory? Thanks to that game, me and my friends made many games without programming back in middle school.

https://www.softpedia.com/get/Others/Home-Education/The-Game...

GameMaker? Now developed by Yoyo Games

https://www.yoyogames.com/gamemaker

DIV games studio?

My family's software company published a product called "Game Builder" in the early-mid 90s that could be used to create adventure games. Here's a listing of it from 1999: https://web.archive.org/web/19990224063815/http://www.mvpsof...

Ha: "In our testing, children as young as eight years old could easily write games with Game Builder Lite..." I'm guessing that would have been me in 1992.

These are too early to be the one you’re looking for, but there have been a number of these, including these two I had myself back in the day:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garry_Kitchen%27s_GameMaker

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoot-%27Em-Up_Construction_Ki...

STOS?

From another comment, it was released by their internal startup incubator. It's potentially not related to anything else at all inside Google, just a project a small team was able to put together with Google's money.

While I suspect there's no deep strategy behind it, one could argue that there's the possibility that long-term, future social networks are going to pop up inside things like Fortnite or Minecraft, and Google would want to capture as much of that space as possible (and sell adverts into it).

Google is always focused on AI. I am pretty sure there will be AI among the players who will behave like humans. Maybe your best friend in game will be an AI.

You can already upload any model to Google Poly. I remember submitting one made in Blender. I thing I had to export it as OBJ.

> Originally I asked what about Google SketchUp also

I'm still using Google's Sketchup 7.0, it runs well enough on Windows 10. The new company turned it into an expensive Pro tool with a 'lite' web only version :(

Got ahead of myself and forgot to check the Steam forum for it... and it was asked and answered already. TLDR; No plans.

https://steamcommunity.com/app/929860/discussions/0/17433576...

I thought Steam could automatically load up Wine, or something like that?

I really believe gaming is the #1 thing holding back linux in the home. The #1 thing in enterprise is probably cheap sysadmins.

It's working for me using Steam Play (Proton 4.2-7) on Xubuntu 19.04.

Steam provides a CDN, updater, friends list/social infrastructure, really terrible but functional user generated content sharing infrastructure, and cloud saves to game developers, so it's pretty appealing even if you're a team inside Google since the alternative is building your own installer and updater - Google has no competitor to Steam on Windows or any other platform of note other than Android.

Also, Gamers actively get angry with developers now if a game releases on something other than Steam, so it's probably better for PR and adoption rates to just target Steam and be done with it.

I remember Trackmania; it appeared well known to me when I played it around 2010, mostly because of the free (as in beer) version.

Are you from the US? It was fairly popular in Europe and also played in the ESL, but I hardly ever saw players from anywhere else.

that should be fairly trivial to implement if they are indeed using unity. i agree it would be cool to have, additionally it would allow for local multiplayer which is always still the best way to enjoy these things imho =]

It seems you can't yet.

Considering google cloud's partnership with Unity, probably Unity.

OMG I had so much fun with SWiSH. Haven't thought about it for a few years now ... brings back some nice memories :)

Yes it looks like it's for kids. Basically everything a kid would want from Minecraft, minus the licensed characters I guess.

I'm not sure, I could see myself playing this with friends.

I enjoy playing games with friends that involve challenges,.but often that just translates to outmaneuvering some enemy in some game.

This seems like a great experience where we can really experience each other's creations. Sort of like Minecraft, but imo it's hard to embrace something that "belongs" to someone else, as things tend to be in minecraft.

Might be me?

Would like to build games and toys, but no longer have the time to learn a proper game-engine.

People who have fun creating, but aren't making a profession out of it. Basically, the digital version of the casual creatives that run D&D games (and create content for those games) for their friends.

Which includes kids, sure, but isn't just kids.

You totally missed minecraft?

I don’t know... this seems likely easy to get going, but limited by the cards. And then you can jump to JS, so it may be a good gateway?

“You can build your own cards with Javascript. Game Builder comes with an extensive API that allows you to script almost everything in the game. All the code is live, so just make a change and save it, no compiling required.”

It still could introduce people to logical thinking. For me when I was kid I was too stupid and gave up too easily to code anything. It felt like an impossible task to learn everything to even get the basics up and running. And it was my dream to make games as a child. Even modding felt like magic beyond my grasp. I couldn't even make a game with RPGMAKER. Maybe this will help someone like my kid-self find that with a little bit of time they can do it.

Quite the contrary - tools like these kinds of gamemaker programs, which factor out knowledge -that previously required a huge amount of individual energy expense- into the social domain, make that strong visceral+interactive portion of computer art more likely to be experienced by more people, leading to the greater likelihood of wanting to learn how to go deeper into those experiences teased by the gamemaker programs. The obvious analogy is how the usefulness of view-source in the earlier days of the internet lead more people into pursuing programming than when you needed some sole purpose programing language compiler or interpreter to see the power of computer code in action.

More people being able to do more stuff is just better. Gatekeeping is rubbish.

Why gatekeep though? If we make it easy for people to make games, who cares if they end up learning to program?

No one actually cares about the code in the games they play. Programming should be a means, not the end. (See also: https://prog21.dadgum.com/87.html)

I would have killed to have tools like Unity when I got into game programming. All of my hobby time was eaten up trying to wrangle OpenGL and C++ and crappy open source engines, and cobbling together a shitty physics engine, so I never got around to the actual game part. When I went back years later to prototype ideas in Unity, it was a breath of fresh air.

However, in my struggles to get off the ground, I did learn a lot more about font rendering than I ever wanted to, and it has come up unexpectedly useful.

Looking at the site, it seems like they also allow for custom scripts if you want functionality that their templates don’t provide.

Looking at the examples in there -- what exactly in that is simple to you? It's fully 3D, which is hard as fuck.

I learned a lot of skills doing Doom WADs that were less close to real coding than what this lets you do (full Javascript API).

My friend got into programming by modding Warcraft 3 maps.

In the beginning he was just dragging and dropping random units to the map.

In the end he was quite proficcient in the embedded script editor.

Yeah, I repeated that as a mantra when I was first learning to program and trying to make games. We all did, it was a common meme of our local game development scene.

And it's utter and complete nonsense. If what you want is to make a game, then these tools aren't half as bad, and at the level of simple games, unless you have some really novel mechanic, you're quite literally wasting time and effort coding it instead of using a game builder.

What drove this point home to me after more than a decade were two situations.

1) on a global game jam, the artist in our team got fed up waiting for us programmers after 3 or 4 hours, and did the prototype we're trying to build in 15 minutes flat, using Construct 2.

2) you too may be surprised to discover that some of the fun and highly acclaimed titles like Cook Serve Delicious or Nuclear Throne were made in Game Maker. I didn't even suspect it until I found it on-line (in the former case, because sources were available in Humble Bundle's Game Maker bundle).

There's value in hand-coding a game, and this is what I still like to do in simple cases, but it's often not the practical option. And if a game maker allows you to add custom code, then really there's no difference between this and Unity or Unreal Engine.

But more kids are writing more code now than ever before, there are books on it and classes on it and video series and coding literacy is actually a cultural movement (maybe driven by a need to depress wages by oversaturating the market,) multiple game creation frameworks and the modding scene which is huge. Motivation is clearly not a problem.

And the sort of simple games that don't require coding in these frameworks are the sort of simple games that no one wants to make and no one wants to play anymore. Sure, you can make breakout or pong or a really, really terrible shooter[0] with just the GUI, but kids who want to "make games" don't want those, they want to make the next Minecraft or Fortnite or MOBA or whatever, which means they're going to have to learn to code eventually.

Not everyone has to start with helloworld.c and learning how to write their own renderer from scratch nowadays. But if and when they do want to learn to write code, then they have far more and better options available than previous generations, from asset packs and templates to Handmade Hero and everything in between.

[0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZqGTzuVGjA

There are enough gateways into programming that if a child is even remotely predisposed to it, they'll come across it at the right time.

based on the article, I think you missed the point. This is a competitor with Minecraft. Not a competitor to Unity.

> No tutorials on how to get started

The system indeed has a tutorial built in.