Highlights
- Game Dev Tycoon allows players to experience the challenges and triumphs of game development without the need for coding or dealing with executives.
- Super Mario Maker lets fans create their own Mario levels, showcasing their creativity and challenging other players.
- Dreams offers a versatile game-making tool where players can create and explore other players' maps, resulting in impressive visual experiences and unique games.
Some games can be so inspirational that they inspire generations of gamers to become game developers. However, in reality, making games is difficult, requiring countless hours of mastering coding, modeling, and writing, not to mention dealing with playtesting, bug fixing, and publishers. Isn't there an easier way to simulate the triumph of video game creation while having fun at the same time?
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As is applicable to most of life's questions, the answer is video games, which can offer just about any experience (even if most of them happen to involve putting bullets into foreheads). Yes, gamers can experience the thrill of knocking their own idea of a good video game without going through Computer Science courses or dealing with chaotic game engine executives. Why? Essentially, video games can be so fun that players want video games in their video games.
1 Game Dev Tycoon
Imagine being able to hop into a time machine back to the 1980s, back to a time when the medium was new, to take a shot at game development stardom. That's the premise of the business-management sim Game Dev Tycoon, which gives players the freedom to create a plethora of game genres and make decisions that will make or break the studio.
Although the game has been out for a while, it generated a huge modding community, which means that players can tweak their experiences any way they like. Upon release, Greenhorn, the studio behind Game Dev Tycoon, purposely released a cracked copy of the game that would slowly erode a pirate's playthrough by dampening their sales with piracy to show the adverse effects of their actions. Now, that's thinking like a game development developer!
2 Super Mario Maker
Super Mario-style games have a brilliant simplicity that just about anyone can intuitively pick up and enjoy. Perhaps with so many insanely difficult ROM hacks for Mario titles, Nintendo was inspired to gamify the level development process for fans of the series and let them construct their own levels.
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Considering his record of genre-bending between titles, it's hardly out of step for the free-running plumber. While most gamers set out to make their levels as difficult as possible, besides noting that the fan-made levels had difficulty curves as steep as Rainbow Road, Nintendo actually took notice of (and praised) the creativity on display from some of their fans.
3 Garry's Mod
While Garry's Mod can totally be used to mess around on (fixing weird expressions on rag-dolling NPCs, building cheese-wheel UFOs, or chucking around random props with physics guns), a lot of what makes the game (or the mod?) special is the user-driven content, including game modes and full games in and of themselves, such as Prop Hunt and Trouble In Terrorist Town.
Gmod, one of the all-time greatest sandboxes, has been used for many a game night, machina animations, and even role-play sessions. Despite being called "Garry's Mod" the game is a standalone title (although the project did start as a Source mod) and has had lasting appeal since 2005. It's a testament to the power of Valve's incredible game engine.
4 The LittleBigPlanet Series
With its friendly, knitted aesthetic and "play, create, share" tagline and ethos, LittleBigPlanet helped to bring the game-making game into the mainstream back in 2008. On the PS3, there are over ten million player-built levels still on servers to play. For gamers who place a game's length as one of the decisive factors to a game's merit, 10 million levels have to count for something.
Plus, it has one of the cutest mascots in gaming! Players can complete the game's main story or freely jump into the levels made by friends or other players on the internet. Simple 2D levels can be built and shared, and completing levels unlocks customization options (either to customize Sackboy's look or assets that the player can use to build their own levels).
5 Project Spark
Project Spark was an ambitious leap forward in giving the public access to powerful, imagination-spurring tools for game creation. Admittedly, most of the games created there tended to look like a jumped-up Fable, but 2013's Project Spark gave plenty of gamers a shot at level design without all the fuss of looking at a blank game project's world space or looking at huge walls of code.
Unlike other "build your own games" of the time, such as Minecraft or LittleBig Planet, Project Spark aimed to give players control over their game worlds' minute details, including character animations, level terrain, and custom assets, which is impressive given it could all be manipulated with joysticks on an Xbox controller.
6 The Magic Circle
In The Magic Circle, the player takes on the role of a QA tester for a game that, without the main character's help, may very well end up as shovelware junk, trapped between the very different visions of its two creators (which appear as gigantic floating eyes). After "beating" the game, the main character becomes trapped in the world and must use their power to delve into code and rip functionality off and onto creatures to escape.
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It's a one-of-a-kind experience from some of the developers behind Bioshock that fans of "behind-the-scenes studio drama" will really dig. Gamers might not learn how to code or even bug test after playing The Magic Circle, but they might get an insight into the process of game development that is rarely seen elsewhere.
7 Dreams
Dreams came from the (sleepy?) minds behind LittleBigPlanet, a beautiful example of collective, community-driven design. The driving idea is pure creation, project circulation, and asset pollination facilitated by seasonal contests. Players can "dreamsurf" across other player's maps. Completing another player's level might result in a reward, such as an asset, which can be used in the player's creations.
The creative process is gamified and helped along with a useful tutorial introducing players to the Dreamiverse. As a game-making tool, Dreams is highly versatile. Fan remakes and truly captivating original games have come out of the project with outstanding visuals and flair to rival a lot of big-budget titles elsewhere on the market.
8 Mad Games Tycoon 2
There have been a few "game dev tycoon/sim" games out over the last few years, but Mad Games Tycoon 2 might be at the top of the stack. Mad Games Tycoon is more on the business side of game development, meaning that players will be pressed into growing their company and will be unable to curate a small team of crack developers.
While this reflects real life more accurately (with all of its mergers and the inevitable studio cannibalism), it can be a turn-off for some. Still, the game goes bewilderingly deep into the finance and tech powering the game industry. For anyone with fantasies of making it rich with a blockbuster in one of the largest sectors in the world, Mad Games Tycoon 2 might be worth a try.