Game Blocks is a free, open source library for making games. It is now a little difficult to install, being old software, but read on if you’re curious about the history or are willing to do a little legwork to get the toolkit loading.
A purely visual programming toolkit, Game Blocks was built with BYOB (Build Your Own Blocks, renamed 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.
Game Blocks was developed as a teaching aid 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.
Visit the main site by clicking on the image to the left. The introductory videos are embedded below for convenience; however, the Game Blocks site contains the most up-to-date list of tutorials and documentation. Happy coding...
Videos
Be sure to watch these in HD so that the UI will be crisp...
Introduction to Game Blocks
Getting Started with Game Blocks
