As I was learning my way around Project Spark , a passerby told me, “that looks like work.” Sometimes, I felt that way too. This is a game about making games, and it functions comparably to game engines such as Unreal or Unity. It can be complicated, tedious, and frustrating -- but the reward for overcoming the challenges of creation is having something your friends, family, and the world can play. This, above all else, makes something that’s already smart and fun even more exciting.

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The part of Project Spark that functions like an actual game is an episodic single-player campaign that demonstrates what’s possible, as well as how you can create useful and fun logic for characters and objects. It’s a helpful first step, but it isn’t enough to guide you to make something whole. Plus, its 3D action game simplicity isn’t terribly enjoyable on its own. But at any point, if you own the objects Project Spark sells piecemeal, you can stop playing and start editing right then and there to figure out how something operates.Everything in Project Spark has a Brain, in which you can modify how an object responds when something happens to it. I’m a game design daydreamer with no formal training, so navigating complicated menus to create artificial intelligence behaviors is terrifying, and getting them to work can be challenging, even in spite of its helpful visual scripting. But it’s interesting, satisfying, and really fun to design a space from scratch, populate it with people, and see them respond to a player character with dialogue you wrote, or a big event you scripted. It feels good to make something. It feels better when someone says it’s cool.Project Spark is a sandbox and a playground for your creativity, and it’s relatively easy to jump in and start creating. It’s also really, really hard to make something that isn’t awful. The tools tend to result in a lot of similar, generic, and unremarkable action games. The level of depth permits stronger, more thoughtful games, but it’ll take the community time to dig beneath the surface to achieve something truly great.That all of those tools are available for free is amazing. Project Spark’s $40 starter set gives you a ton of new props for visual variety, and the DLC packs have even more, but everything you need to make something is available for free. Understanding these systems takes time and effort, but Project Spark is reasonably accessible. Because Spark’s tutorials only scratch the surface of what it can do, I relied heavily on YouTube videos to tell me how to use a boolean variable, or what an object’s vector means. Now they’re core to the kinds of games I’m making with friends -- and making games with friends is where Project Spark becomes something truly special.Cooperative design is easily the best thing about Project Spark. I enjoyed my time alone, tinkering with 2D platformers and 3D action games, but having someone else to help make your game design dreams come true is legitimately among my favorite game experience in a while.While my friend created an interactive sequence later in our 2D platformer level, I decorated an early scene with new lighting, visual effects, and props. He, the designer, me, the artist. In another game, I used Project Spark’s flexible tools to create walls, paths, and visual cues. That’s level design. Meanwhile, he was making a non-playable character respond to player interactions using the Brain editor’s visual programming. We argued about what was best for the game versus what was best for the player. We solved problems together, and he cleaned up my messes. This isn’t exactly like being a development team -- but like Rock Band is awesome for wannabe rockstars, Project Spark is a terrific approximation of what it might be like to work at a video game studio. Here, though, you actually create something you can share, and doing it together is as good as Project Spark gets.It’s still very early in its life, so right now most of what Project Spark’s community has made is...lacking in quality, to say the least. People are still learning what’s possible though, and I found myself giving high ratings to games that accomplished novel things I didn’t know how to do, rather than games I actually thought were good.There’s potential here, even if most of the action games are garbage Fable clones, or straight-up remakes of other games. But imitation is a helpful way to learn.To be fair, my games are simple, pointless, or too limited to be good. I have not made anything I’m comfortable sharing publicly, and I’m not sure I ever will. But what I have is a small collection of things representing my growth as a creator. I’m proud of what I’ve made -- even though you’d probably hate it. If you spend time with Project Spark, you might appreciate my cool cave-in sequence, or the fixed camera right behind my main character. Maybe you’ll make something you’ve always dreamed of, or learn from my mistakes.