Overview 

Game Blocks is a free, open source library for making games.  A purely visual programming toolkit, it was built with BYOB (Build Your Own Blocks) from UC Berkeley, which is built on top of Scratch.  

Scratch is developed by the Lifelong Kindergarten group at the MIT Media Lab.

See http://scratch.mit.edu

Game Blocks was developed as a teaching aid by game developer Sheldon Pacotti for a course at the University of Texas entitled "RTF 344M: Writing and Narrative Design for Video Games."  (See the syllabus.)

The library allows novice game designers to experiment with storytelling, animation, physics, interaction and standard game types like adventure games, platformers, and arcade shooters.  Projects can be compiled into executables for Mac, PC, and Linux.  The library itself, running within BYOB, is cross-platform as well.

Downloads

The following free downloads are available from this site:

Game Blocks v0.2.4 Library and Examples

Game Blocks v0.2.4 Source Code

Support

For the latest information on community projects, bugs, and ongoing development, please visit the NLI forums.

Tutorials

For the easy path to learning about Game Blocks, please browse the following series of videos.  (You'll need to allow popups.)

- Intro -

Introduction

Getting Started

- Writing -
Emotes Tutorial

Cut Scenes Tutorial

Talk Trees Tutorial

- Game Systems - 

Player Movement Tutorial

Game Levels Tutorial

Inventory Tutorial

- Enhancements - 

Cartoons Tutorial

Physics Tutorial

- Game Types -

Platformer Tutorial

Arcade Shooter Tutorial

Simulation Game Tutorial

Point and Click Adventure Tutorials
(Watch the Game Levels and Inventory tutorials.)