Overview

Game Blocks is a free, open source library for making games.  It is mostly of historical interest now, since it has been many years since the underlying platform, BYOB, was replaced by Snap!  (The BYOB link below will take you to Snap!) You may be able to get these blocks running in the old BYOB, though, by checking the BYOB Archives.

I actually made a good run at recreating this toolkit in Snap!, toward the end of my teaching stint, then I was plugging away at a fully custom engine, as programmers are wont to do, which would have achieved an ideal I was shooting for (super-easy to build games & stories, a sharing/publishing model, slightly more professional output than BYOB/Snap!, etc.)  But that became one of many ambitious, half-finished projects littering my past. Maybe I'll get back to it someday.  There must be an easier way to introduce students to game development than the hide-and-seek UIs of most game engines.

Back to the historical article...

A purely visual programming toolkit, Game Blocks was built with BYOB (Build Your Own Blocks, now redirects to Snap!) 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.)