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Comment by bigtunacan | Hacker News Reader

This New Yorker article makes it sound like this is something revolutionary. How long ago was Roblox created? That's nothing but a giant game creation sandbox and it lets the creators charge for their content. It's simple and intuitive enough to use that my 10 year old had been creating her own minigames for more than a year now.

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There was also Adventure Construction Set, released back in 1984 for the C64: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adventure_Construction_Set

Yup and ZZT was another one. There is quite a history of "games for making games". I think this breathless "everything is different now!" narrative is overblown, but I do think these sorts of games/toolkits give voice to people who might not have otherwise had an easy path for expression.

Specifically, I think of this personal account: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1940535026/

On that note: ZZT has an active community preserving, reviewing, remixing and creating games, centered around https://museumofzzt.com/

Sometimes things don't have to be absolutely unprecedented to be revolutionary.

A fun iOS one was "Amazing Alex," which was The Incredible Machine with user-uploaded levels.

The game industry in general has a memory of about 10 years, perhaps 15 years tops. They'll praise innovation and radical differentiation despite the core features being the core features in major games just two decades earlier.

The favorite example is star control 2 versus Mass effect, the latter being a clear spiritual successor and yet somehow managed to be worse in nearly every aspect except graphics, and perhaps combat (which, in general, is fairly bland and uneccesary in both titles... but ME does admittedly have more depth to it's combat)

So yes, this is clearly revolutionary technology.

A few years ago I was looking for space themed games where you control a ship and are allowed to trade. Think of Escape Velocity, Star Sonata 1/2, Space Rangers, Freelancer, X3, etc. For some reason a lot of forum posts were about Mass Effect when it comes to space games. When I actually played Mass Effect 2 I realized that it was just a generic cover shooter like Mafia 2 or Sleeping Dogs. Oh and it was so glitched I fell off the map multiple times and often got stuck on top of random objects like tables. It was an absolutely awful experience.

Hm. Not really what I was getting at -- ME was perfectly functional, just the characters, races, inter-racial relationships (non-romantic), exploration mechanisms (eg ME bounds you by plotline, SC2 bounds you by fuel and danger), and world history -- all of the core components that made ME interesting as a title -- were substantially inferior to its decades-older predecessor.

The only aspects it managed to be superior were irrelevant to the main thing it was trying to be

Mass Effect is an action RPG, so I'm not sure why you're even comparing it to those other games. Of course it's nothing like them.

You did not know how to search? Mass Effect is about a beautiful world and lore to explore, cool quests and hard decisions.

Wikipedia says 2006, the same year that Garry's Mod was released, another "video game that lets you make video games". There are plenty of other examples too. I'm not sure why this author treats it like a new, revolutionary concept.

The problem with these games is they just end up being a weird middle ground between development tools and games. The "gameplay" is driven purely by the player's creative drive, which results in a somewhat niche audience. The toolset also usually ends up being more accessable than normal development tools, but also much more limiting.

The article doesn't make it clear what is actually special about this game. It just reads like a fluff piece.

Garry's Mod (as a game development "platform") essentially boils down to a Lua interpreter bolted to the Source Engine, with access to assets from Valve's games. If you want to make a new game(mode) in Garry's Mod, you still have to write code, design levels and possibly create models, textures and sounds in separate somewhat hard to use programs.

That's very different from Dreams, where you can create everything within the same program with a unified set of pretty accessible tools and a very fast iteration cycle.

The limited nature can also make them appealing. A lot of the charm in Mario Maker 2 is the clever things people come up with within the restrictions.

The really enthusiastic creators _really_ learn how the editor and game engine works, for example this document goes into detail about how to take advantage of a quirk of the engine to pull off elaborate constructs:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1RlBSyS8WcW4S9NIHG0lGjWkN...

Was wondering if this was going to be SALTI. We must hang out in the same discord. ;)

Roblox was pretty interesting in that it has this built in game editor that is very accessible, but is also highly extensible through Lua so the players/builders can ramp up their skills over time.

Add to that it's marketplace. Many users will never using the building tools and just play games made by other players. Not entirely unique, I was doing Unreal mods decades ago, but the way it is all presented and the varying levels of accessibility are still compelling.

StarCraft's map editor was another big one in the late 90's

Don't forget WarCraft 3. It spawned Tower Defense and DOTA

StarCraft 1 had Tower Defense maps as well. Much more cobbled together than what you could do in WC3, but impressive given the limitations.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aeuNWZXN6RI

so this game contains an impressive audio/music tools , nice sculpting tools, logic widgets. like I helped my 13 years old son rotate an object in space by connecting some velocity vectors, sin wave widgets (there is no way to input polynomials or trigonometric functions that we found, so you have a sign wave and you change it's shape to look like what you need ). widgets to record data(aka variables) event like things. Then it has sharing. My son played the other games from this team Little Big Planet, he is not into programming (I tried to teach him basic stuff but code syntax is too abstract and error prone) where this kind of games encourage experimenting ... it is not something for developers to create games so is not a Unity/Unreal competitor

Wonder whether microbit with weatherbit may help. It is quite interesting to have done physical (even if just barometer but better with the weather station part) to see how things interact.

I found the block language and (non mit phone) part interesting as well.

Not expensive give a try.

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