Google made a video game to make other video games

We all love to play a variety of video games that give us many hours of joy (and are frankly the reason for this site existing), but few understand what it takes to make video games. Indeed, the video game development industry is quite a cutthroat one which requires very skilled individuals working together to craft something over many months and years to only often see it crash and burn if fans don’t take to the playing experience quite as they’d hoped. It’s a ruthless industry that sees it as more of a labour of love than something that is going to make you loads of money.

It’s that hard work and financial uncertainty which led me to abandon dreams of game development early on in my career and rather land up with something more stable. Still, the passion for making games remains, even if the time to do so doesn’t and so when companies come up with creative ways for people to still flex these muscles that’s a good thing.

Google has now come up with a new video game of its own, logically titled Game Builder, which essentially allows people to build Minecraft-style games of their own which others can then play through themselves. Taking a lot of inspiration from Microsoft’s Minecraft, the game lets you drag and drop characters and scenery into an empty sandbox to construct your world, then use pre-set commands to string together how things interact or even dabble in JavaScript for further customization. People can choose to build games themselves or in a co-op mode with friends, which should certainly enhance the experience and scale of the games on hand.

Interestingly the game, which comes from Area 120, has actually been available through Steam since November 1st last year as an experimental prototype (it already has 190 reviews, with a “very positive” score), but Google only publicized it today, obviously feeling that it is now ready for the world and is hoping more people start playing it.  Game Builder is free to play and available on both Windows and macOS.

So, if you’ve ever dreamed of making games of your own, but never quite found the time, now perhaps you might have a more simplistic way of bringing some of your creative ideas to fruition.

Last Updated: June 14, 2019