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 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; 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