Bloxels reminds me of those electronics kits you’d get for Christmas 20 or 30 years ago, which parents generally approved of because they diverted your eyes from the TV for an hour and promised some degree of education along with …
Bloxels reminds me of those electronics kits you’d get for Christmas 20 or 30 years ago, which parents generally approved of because they diverted your eyes from the TV for an hour and promised some degree of education along with your entertainment.
But this offers a whole lot more. It’s actually a way to build a video game using small, plastic cubes. Well, pixels, really. There’s a 10-by-10 game board grid that you place these physical pixels in as you start designing your game in the real world.
These pixels make up the building blocks of the Bloxels smartphone and tablet app you download, which then takes a look at how you’ve arranged things via the camera and imports your design automatically. The green pixels are used to make up walls, yellow represent collectible coins, there are pink keys to get you through the white exits, and then there are more flexible elements like enemies, power ups and actions.
If this is starting to sound familiar, perhaps a little bit like the game creator Pixel Press that uses graph paper (or its recently licensed version, Adventure Time Game Wizard), there’s good reason for that. Pixel Press Technology are the brains behind Bloxels as well.
This could be the beginnings of a video game design fascination for kids that easily blossoms into a career, and it’s easy to see how they could begin designing simple puzzles that grow more complex as they test out the game’s logic in a digital environment. Guide books apps are also planned that will make use of your game board designs in a superhero-based game.
Bloxels isn’t out yet, but pre-orders are coming soon and there’s a current release schedule of Christmas 2015, making it the ideal alternative for one of those rubbish electronics kits. Check it out.
