Why Don’t You Make a Game this Week?
Lets take a look at some easy-to-use game making tools! Waterstons Innovation: Adventures in Innovation #6.
(Alex) I started my career in game development. I was lucky enough to work on some big, exciting titles including Crash Bandicoot and Lego Batman but I had the most fun making small indie games. It’s truly amazing what you can create in just a few days using an off-the-shelf tool and a bit of creative brain power.
For this week’s Innovation newsletter, I thought I’d give you some recommendations for tools that pretty much anyone can use to make their own games.
What is this? We want to think out loud and share with you the work we do and the process we use to get there - whether we are successful or not. An important part of innovation, as we see it, is partnering and collaborating with other folks to achieve things you couldn’t do by yourself. Adventures in Innovation is our bi-weekly newsletter to document the journeys we go on to meet all these amazing people.
Twine
Remember ‘Choose your own Adventure’ books? Well, Twine will help you build an interactive one. Hugely powerful and flexible, what’s truly amazing is that if you can use Visio then you can use Twine. Through a simple drag-and-drop interface, you build a flow chart that represents the player’s path through your game. You can add branching narratives, build complicated puzzles for the player to explore and even give them an inventory of items to carry around. Many years ago I built a Twine game as part of a marketing campaign at Waterstons called The Great Quest. Twine is totally free and the games it makes are just web pages!
Bitsy
Bitsy is a bit like Twine but with simple pictures. You can use the Bitsy tools to make little characters and objects and then design rooms and worlds for your characters to walk around in. In many ways simpler than Twine but you can still use it to tell really interesting stories mostly through conversations you have with the objects you create in the world.
A researcher at the British Library used Bitsy during the pandemic to build a virtual British Library that people could explore when they couldn’t go to the actual library. It's extremely cute and worth a look. You can find it at The British Library Simulator.
Stencyl
Thirty years ago I was gifted a tool called Klik & Play. It was a drag-and-drop game maker that now has acquired cult status. It was great fun to use and you could make all sorts of little games with very little development knowledge.
These days Klik & Play is long gone, but Stencyl keeps that dream alive. Stencyl is significantly more complicated than either Bitsy or Twine but also much more powerful. It’s possible to build detailed game worlds with AI-driven characters and intricate stories, all within Stencyl’s low code interface. If you or your kids have ever used Scratch at school to learn the basics of programming then you’ll quickly get up to speed with Stencyl’s interface, it’s essentially identical. From platform games to 2D racing games, the engine is capable of nearly anything. We even used it to build a game about storm drains.
Making games is great fun and can be an amazing creative outlet for all those incredible ideas in your head. These tools can also be great ways of prototyping little apps or making little marketing toys.
Roundup
We have a lot of exciting things happening in the Innovation team. We are problem-agnostic problem solvers. Over the next few weeks, we will go deeper into each project - whether they are successful or not!
🦠 Mould Detection: We are looking to make Social Housing homes safer from mould and damp by designing software to give early warning signs. We have recently learned about awaretag’s - which may provide an interesting solution to this!
🐕 Robot Dog: we are currently setting something up between a robotics lab and a client of ours. Can we use a robot dog to remove humans from dangerous environments?
🤖 AI Document Generation: writing documentation sucks: it’s boring and repetitive and not the most valuable use of your or your client’s time. Can we use modern AI models to speed up the process of writing draft documentation?