One of the best features of the level editor is that you can swap from building to playing at any time. This lets you rapidly test out your ideas to see how they work from a player’s perspective, and turns the act of building a level into a fantastically iterative one. Playing a half-finished level also makes it easier to spot big problems like a gap that's too big to jump over, and I found myself constantly jumping back and forth between the two modes. The editor lets you add things like enemies and power-ups, as well as customize the look through a pair of pre-built visual themes with a distinctly Saturday morning cartoon feel (more are expected to launch as in-app purchases). You can also share your creations with the app's arcade mode, which highlights some of the better user-created levels much like in games like LittleBigPlanet and Project Spark. It's also a great place to generate ideas by looking at what other players have made.

Floors doesn't let you create entire games, just levels. But while you have relatively basic options at your disposal, you can still build surprisingly complex stages. Each of the three sections has a lot of space, letting you craft dense, intricately detailed levels that will take some time for players to get through. And power-ups like the jetpack, which lets your character fly for a limited time, open up a whole new range of possibilities. The one thing Floors doesn’t manage to get around is the challenge of making a platform game work perfectly with touchscreen controls. While the on-screen buttons are responsive, actual movement and jumping feels loose and floaty, lacking the precision of a Nintendo game.

Floors can be a frustrating app. While it works most of the time, getting to the point where it reliably recognizes your inputs requires some annoying trial and error. And sometimes the tiniest mistake, like failing to fully erase something, can result in a level that doesn't match what you drew. That's not even including all of the time it takes to memorize the different symbols and what they do. But the learning curve is worth it. Seeing something you drew with a pencil transform into an actual, playable game is a pretty amazing experience — even if it takes some work to get it working right. It's also free to download, and all of the key features are available even if you don't spend anything. Right now the only things you can buy are additional enemies and power-ups, though more in-app purchases are coming to help expand the experience. "You're almost buying toys for a toy set," says Pixel Press founder Robin Rath.

"We wanted to reinvent the wheel with each new genre."

Pixel Press is a platform that will keep expanding. While Floors only lets you build platform games, the project’s roadmap includes at least two more apps designed for different genres. Quest will allow for larger worlds and puzzles so that you can build a Zelda-style adventure using multiple sheets of paper, while the aptly named Tracks is for building overhead racing games. Both of these apps will likely launch sometime next year. "We felt like we wanted to reinvent the wheel with each new genre, based on what we learned from the previous one," says Rath. Floors may be simple, but through content updates and new apps, Pixel Press could turn into a very powerful tool.

Nintendo might not be building the Metroid of my dreams, but there could soon be an app that lets me do it myself.