a creator you can list your stuff, and people can buy it. With a super transparent breakdown that’s going to be pretty straightforward.
So dot big bang has click and create features - do they teach kids how to think about coding in the same way that the logic gate mechanics would in something like LittleBigPlanet? Robert: Yeah, so I think, you know, the way that we tried to do it is very different. Most platforms, I think, categorise things very roughly into educational tools. Most educational tools are focusing on explicitly trying to teach you coding. This is a variable, this is a loop, and this is conditional. I think that the way people learn is actually pretty different. I think they learn because they want to do something. Most people learn, because they want to achieve a goal. I think what we’re trying to do here is pretty different,
because everything in dot big bang is built using the same tools that we use to build the games that were building. The kind of high end games. When you drag something into the world, that’s drag and drop, but you can just mess about with it. So it’s just got some sliders. But if you open that thing up, you can look inside of
it. Then you can see that, ‘Oh, it’s built using code’, and then you can open the code, and then you can change the code and you can continue that way. In the future, we’re definitely going to add an intermediate stage, which is block programming like Scratch. The difference with our block programming is the kind of shape of that or whatever is the shape of a normal game engine. Whereas Scratch is very different to how games are made. It just feels completely alien. Because the way everything’s set up is completely
different. dot big bang’s architecture is more like Unity and Unreal Engine. If you learn programming in dot big bang, it’s also a language that you can get a job with. It’s TypeScript, rather than Lua, which is the quite niche language used for games in Roblox.
Are there any challenges that you’ve spotted and want to address as you take dot big bang forward? Ashley: Educational challenges. Bridging the gap from total beginner to being confident enough to start playing with tools. I think a lot of times people are scared to break things, or that if they try something new, it won’t work. Then they shy away from even trying. I’ve done streams for a long time where I’m making a game and dropping things on stream. Trying to make that more accessible. Showing that you can just open up new scripts and start writing and you could mess it up 100 times. It’s fine if you break things. It’s fine to just try things. I think bridging that gap for people who’ve never done it before is important. Especially with young people who haven’t written code before. Getting into that part and making it not look
intimidating, showing that it’s easy, and that you can just start with the basics is always a challenge. I’m always trying to think of other ways to bridge that gap for people who are making games and make sure that it’s obvious that you can just remix something and start adding stuff and you don’t need to feel any pressure. You don’t need to know all this stuff to start trying.
If you’d like to try out dot big bang for yourself, you can find it at
https://dotbigbang.com/
52 | MCV/DEVELOP August 2022
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