The barrier to entry for game development

"The barrier to entry for game development has been demolished," says games developer Christer Kaitila. "These are exciting times for an emerging art – the gates have been flung wide open."Though it started as a niche hobby, DIY game design is set to go mainstream. Microsoft's Project Spark aims to turn the making of games itself into a game. Players are given a fully configurable world that can be moulded with gestures recognised by Kinect – mountains are sculpted and valleys scooped out with a swipe of the hand. Buildings, characters and objects of almost any kind can be added via graphical interfaces.

Once it is all in place, users can devise simple scripts that give their creations programmed behaviours. One demo of the game showed how a rock, for example, could be turned into a faithful sidekick by adding a few short commands.Early testers have already created a wide variety of games, from block-matching puzzle games to side-scrollers, top-down shooters, and 3D first-person adventures – many of them recreations of existing games. Project Spark makes this level of creativity accessible by hiding hundreds of lines of code beneath the interfaces that are second nature to gamers.

Game Maker, a tool for creating games on the PC, has been used to make several successful titles, including Spelunky, Hotline Miami and Gunpoint. "Game Maker is great because it's good for beginners," says Tom Francis, who used the tool to make Gunpoint. "But it doesn't keep you a beginner." When Francis started making the game he was working as a games journalist and had no programming experience. What he likes about Game Maker is how it lets you move from sketching out the basics of a game in a drag-and-drop interface to adding in blocks of code bit by bit, as you learn. "It's a great way to ramp up," he says.