BBC launches Doctor Who Game Maker for fans to create own games

PanARMENIAN.Net - The BBC has launched a new Doctor Who Game Maker tool, letting fans of the perennially popular show create and share their own games featuring the time-traveling doctor, VentureBeat reports.

Today’s launch comes almost a year after the BBC introduced another Doctor Who-themed game to help teach coding to kids, though it was restricted to a U.K. audience only. With Doctor Who Game Maker, however, the BBC is opening things up to international users, and represents part of BBC Mixital, a new platform that lets anyone create their own content based on BBC brands — such as Doctor Who.

In Doctor Who Game Maker, users can either create a whole new game from scratch, or build one from a set of pre-made templates that will be familiar to Doctor Who fans.

You can choose a myriad of elements to include in the game, such as your character (e.g. who you will control), enemies, and what items you can “collect” to win. You can also choose from platform games, puzzles, or even racers.

Digging deeper into the inner workings, it’s possible to influence how items move within the game, adding special effects, and animating objects along the way.

Working across tablets and desktop computers, the Doctor Who Game Maker is fairly intuitive to use, and will appeal to the show’s millions of fans around the world. While this will no doubt go some way towards promoting what is a lucrative brand for BBC Worldwide, the BBC says its core raison d’être is to give “young people the chance to get creative with digital technology and introduces them to game design.” In other words, it complements the Doctor and the Dalek game for budding coders.

In the next week, the BBC says it will add an open “Arcade” area where users can post their handiwork and let anyone from around the world play the game(s) they created. These games will also be playable on mobile phones.