There’s no shortage of nit-picking gamers who feel they could easily make better video games than what’s being released every week. And thanks to a new iPad app called Toy Engine, they can put their money where their mouths are and design their own side-scrolling video game, even if they’ve never written a single line of code.
No one’s really had a chance to play with Nintendo’s upcoming Mario Maker just yet, but it’s assumed that it dumbs the level-building process down to where even a five-year-old can handle it. Toy Engine, on the other hand, has an incredibly robust level editor that’s connected to a back-end flowchart-like coding system that you can easily use to customize every last aspect of the world you’ve made. And, unlike Mario Maker, it’s available for the iPad right now, for free.
You’ll need an active Apple iCould account to save your creations on your iPad, edit them again later, or share them with other amateur developers. But setting that up is probably the most challenging part about designing your own video game level here. [Toy Engine]