Are your children brimming with ideas, but you’re tired of playing “Calvin Ball”? (If you’re not familiar with Calvin and Hobbes, Calvin frequently makes up games and changes the rules as he goes.) You need the Game Creator’s Workshop! This short book details how to design a video game in a fun, approachable manner, suitable for any child to follow.
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Over the summer, I was asked to be a beta reader for the Game Creator’s Workshop. A beta reader (at least in my experience) is someone who gets a free advance (before publishing) copy of a book in exchange for a review, ideally as soon as the book goes live. This helps books gain visibility, and beta readers can also provide valuable feedback to the author. Beta readers often do not get a final version of the book, so there may be changes between what they receive and what is officially published. Usually, these changes are minor (typos, formatting).
With this in mind, please note that my experiences may differ from your experiences with the final product. Hopefully, the author took these into account and made some improvements, but I haven’t purchased the published book so don’t know this for sure. However, the images here I grabbed from the preview pages on Amazon, so it looks like some issues are still present.
First, the Pros of the Game Creator’s Workshop
The Game Creator’s Workshop itself is gamified. There are 10 levels with a boss to beat at each level. Each level begins with a supply list, difficulty level, and skills that will be learned. There are main quests and side quests with activities for each.
My favorite part of the Game Creator’s Workshop is that it can be used to help anyone create any type of game (video, card, board, role-playing, etc) or even a story! After all, they all share similar elements of characters, conflict, and resolution.
I also appreciated the parent pages and notes throughout the book. However, I felt like they disrupted the flow and would have been better in their own section, like how answers are in the back of a book.
And Now for the Cons
These range from minor, quick fixes (that hopefully were fixed) to more critical aspects. On the minor side was formatting. Many elements were just a little bit crooked, which was very distracting for me. There were also random stars which interfered with some of the words. I doubt my kids noticed, though.
A medium-level con was that some of the examples were separated from where they were introduced, which was confusing to me. It would have made more sense to keep those together, on the same page. One element (a “hero sprite”) we’re asked to draw, even though it was never introduced.
The biggest downside is that the whole thing seemed rather basic and introductory. Also, as someone who has had to do all my own designing and actual creation, the assumption that our kids would be able to hand off their game design document to a development team to code their game for them seemed … unrealistic. Privileged, at the very least. Certainly out of touch with the reality many are living.
One relatively small thing that annoyed me was that the book was not hyperlinked. I love it when digital documents are hyperlinked within themselves, so it’s easy to get to different parts. However, when I looked it up on Amazon, it was only a paperback version, so the lack of hyperlinks makes sense. And while I don’t think I’d pay $13 for it, it is cheaper than most other options available.
Overall, the Game Creator’s Workshop is a decent book. It’s aimed at ages 8-12, but like I said, would be good for anyone who appreciates something playful. It did make me want to create a game or write a story, so that’s certainly worth something!
