Anniversary: Two Years On, Here Are Some Amazing Game Builder Garage Creations

It’s a shame Nintendo didn’t include online functionality to Labo VR. That would excite me much more.

Such amazing content. Bravo to all.
I really really struggled to get into the methodology of this thing. Growing up in the 80s with Basic, through Amos and Blitz, and lately SmileBASIC... I'm a "typing" coder, and the "drag/connect" stuff didn't work for me, but..
Daaang, that's some some great examples of the power that can be accomplished if you know what on Earth you're doing with the tech!

@Jayenkai : Same. I didn't like the "drag/drop" component of the experience, which dissuaded me from seriously trying to make anything.

I used to play a lot of ZZT (from Epic Games, of Fortnite fame) in my late primary school and early high school years, and the game had its own programming language which was easy to pick up, with a lot of possibilities for those clever enough. I've never learned to code, but this is perhaps as close as I've ever gotten to it.

But man, oh, man, I would LOVE a new WarioWare DIY. I managed to make some fairly sophisticated games with those limited tools that I'm still very proud of. Weirdly, I never shared them online, which I regret in hindsight.

@Jayenkai Yeah, with Game Builder Garage some simple things which you could do with a couple lines of code might take a ton of time and space. It's a cool game/thingie, but not worth the time required to make anything.

The problem I think wasn’t necessarily with the drag and drop, it was there was no way to encapsulate parts of the game logic, so you just end up with an unmanageable spider’s web of components all over the place.

If it was possible to group parts of your game up into boxes that could be closed so you didn’t have so much clutter everywhere it would have made it much easier to work with.

Also, I think it needed much better texture and sprite tools. Animating sprites requires such a huge amount of manual work when all that should be needed is just to be able to load a sequence of drawn images.

An update or sequel with much better tools could be truly excellent, but I don’t think it sold well enough for Nintendo to try again sadly.

@Sisilly_G Oooh, a new WarioWare DIY would be amazing, but I get the feeling this is probably the direction they're going instead. Which is a shame. I thought the tutorial for WWDIY was really well made.

Wow I completely forgot this game existed.

To be honest, they should have just released this for free. And made all the content playable for free and allowed upload to public behind Nintendo Online. We are in a post Roblox, Fortnite and a million other free UGC world. The tools seem too obscure for mass success, they needed to counterbalance that with a massive open gate to play.

This could have really been something had Nintendo made a proper level sharing system.

@Noble_Haltmann Nintendo did as well.

My son plays this whenever he is allowed to play video games. Basically, when he can play by himself, this is what he's playing. He's created some really creative stuff. Ultimately, we're all a little bit this. All three of us are on the spectrum. When we fall in love with a game, it's easy to forget about all other games.

Sonic Frontiers and Super Mario 3D Aisle are well made. It was fun watching.

The user created games should be available for free to any Switch owner. It would boost the interest of those who create the games.

@AlanaHagues, thanks for the shout out. 😊

I did make a Joust-like.
Astro Joust: G-004-6LN-C5Y

Mario Maker, Labo, Game Builder Garage, Tears of the Kingdom - Nintendo really has construction on their brains.

I got this game on launch day. I thought it looked neat, and was excited to create some weird, fun minigames. While I did enjoy tinkering and creating small games and projects, the one thing that kept me from absolutely adoring this game was the fact that I couldn't see what the rest of the community was up to. Unlike games like Super Mario Maker, you couldn't just upload your creations to in the game some worldwide creation-veiwing area to allow other people to see what you've made. If you wanted to share your creations, you first had to get a code for your game, then share that code with the community through some external website or something, since you can't just upload them through the game itself and have people veiw your creation straight from the game. The Game Builder Garage subreddit is the only place where I can see what the community is doing.

The poll answer about more music features made me think again that they should put Mario Paint on NSO.

Cool to see the levels of creativity.
I gave up on this kind of games after playing Super Mario Maker over 200h.
I just don't have the patience to first make a game before playing it, or to search through an infinite list to find a good one anymore.
I do appreciate this kind of highlight article. Really cool to see what others are making of the game.

@Jayenkai Interesting comment. I too was BASIC and a little C++ so wondered if this would click.

I messed with it, but every time I tried to do something, I can never figure stuff out, and for whatever reason I can never find help, either. After that I just get bored, give up, and go back to other games. :/

Thanks for sharing these awesome games! It's soo cool to see how far the community has come in these 2 amazing years.

Shoutout to Laura Sofia, the creator of the now defunct mygarage.games, for archiving her website on Github. I was able to extract the game data and create the spreadsheet mentioned near the beginning of the article.

Also hi @Jayenkai! I remember you from the SmileBASIC community

@Sisilly_G Share them now! Wiimmfi works for it!

it's kinda funny, most people seem to make games by using existing IPs and not coming up with own Ideas. Either that or sites like nintendolife feature more those IP copies than fresh ideas, which is a pitty.

@NintendoJunkie While I consider the game itself quite reasonably priced, I agree that it could really have benefited from a lower barrier to entry — as well as expanded sharing options.

I mean, it’s not technically impossible for Nintendo to bring this game to NSO alongside a massive update that adds Mario Maker-style sharing functionality, but… well, it seems a rather fanciful prediction at this stage.

Mario Kart got (very) belated DLC though, so who knows!

Did get the demo at launch, hoped my daughtyer would like it, she didn't really, so i put it on wish list.. so boguht it when it finally game on sale 6 months ago.. haven't find time to play it yet, so thanx for the reminder

I loved the simplicity, but hated how limited it was. I ended up learning Unity instead. I applaud the creators in this article for they've managed to make with such a limited toolset.

You should do one of these for Fuze4 and SmileBasic as well!

You might as well call the purple one with the white circle Rayman. I wonder how many people made any Rayman creations in this game.

@Maxz @NintendoJunkie You are both correct. Most people just want to play the creations. $30 is the right price for the dev tools, but too high for the casual player.

A “free” player for this and Mario Maker 2 would be perfect for NSO subscribers.

@DwaynesGames But why sell the game? If you wanted to play Mario Maker levels or GBG games you buy the game. The game comes with extra functionality to be creative if you want but that's not why people buy these games, it's to play stuff. If they limited it only to people interested in creating, barely anyone would buy it, I know I wouldn't.

@Maxz @DwaynesGames I worked on Fortnite for years and that is a FTP game. Even with no financial barrier to create games on the platform, we found that a very small, small, minority of players made games. Even fewer published those games to the masses.

Given that experience, I wouldn't be surprised if Game Garage has a similar problem of a vast percentage of players haven't even made one game let alone publish them. And then you take that small proportion and only a minute amount of those are even fun.

It is a hard problem to solve, especially when the initial financial barrier limits the audience size.

I guess this a long way of saying we are all in agreement. (high fives all around)

@Nintendo_Thumb In the case of GBG, most people still didn’t buy it. Currently in the NL poll, 55% have never played it.

You are right about Mario Maker 2, but it offers a much different (and deeper) experience,.

GBG would benefit the most by having a separate player. Those that like tinkering would still buy the full game, and they would gain a larger audience for their creations.

Game Builder Garage saddens me: here we have an interesting IP with loads of potential for updates to the engine to help this game flourish with tons of shared content to boot from players around the world, but as always, like with Nintendo's other one-offs, they just let it sit and rot with no mention of it again, whatsoever and with no new content to add at all.

All that effort and they spelled "isle" wrong (assuming they meant an island or peninsula, and not a passage between rows of seats in a building such as a church or theatre, an aircraft, or train).

That aside, what an amazing achievement.