Buildbox is a lesser-known series of game engines that’s made its name through an easy, drag-and-drop interface that’s accessible for beginners. Buildbox entered the industry by cutting down the functionality of a game engine, a complex piece of software that stitches together visuals, audio, and game logic, to the bare basics. Buildbox has continued to see use in popular mobile games since its release 10 years ago, and the company has added three new iterations of the engine in the intervening time. Buildbox isn’t as well -known as engines like Unity and Unreal, so read on to learn about what situations Buildbox is effective for and when it’s best to look elsewhere.
Is Buildbox good for making games?
Buildbox is an effective choice for making games at a beginner level. Buildbox has so many assets, templates, and simple blocks of premade code that anybody’s able to make a working game without prior experience. The power of its tools is limited, though, especially given its price tag.
Buildbox’s free assets make getting started easy and include basic primitive shapes, enemies, item pickups, and obstacles with prebuilt logic. A set of free assets are available to subscribers immediately, and Buildbox 3 builds an asset store directly into the engine’s interface which includes a mixture of more free and premium resources. All custom assets and assets retrieved from the store go into the Asset Library, which is where any custom assets go as well. In Buildbox Classic and Buildbox 3, adding a custom asset is done simply through dragging and dropping a PNG or FBX into the interface. Buildbox handles the rest, including importing animations and textures.
Buildbox’s drag-and-drop features make it most effective for the types of games that it’s targets:ed at, the mobile market. Mobile games tend to have simple visuals, short gameplay loops, and low-fidelity assets. Hyper-casual games especially fit the Buildbox niche. They’re quick -to -build and accessible to small or solo development teams. Hyper-casual titles areThey’re ultra- simple, almost prototype-level games that include mainstream successes like Subway Surfers.
Buildbox helps developers deal with implementing in-app advertisements, an important point for the mobile market. Hyper-casual games rely entirely on ad revenue. Similar to Unity, Buildbox has a tool called Adbox which allows the user to integrate ads directly within Buildbox. The user interface gives options for displaying different types of ads at certain points in the game through its Mind Map system, to be covered shortly.
Buildbox’s pricing model makes it less effective for experienced developers. Given that Unity and Unreal have completely free tiers of their software, Buildbox’s paid model isn’t necessarily worth it since a designer who’s used another game engine doesn’t need the pre-built assets and game logic that Buildbox provides. The thousands of free assets in the Unity and Unreal asset stores mean a developer on these other platforms isn’t missing out on starter content. To get access to Buildbox 4, the cheapest plan is $24.99/month, although releasing games requires the Pro plan, at $274.99/year.
The premium version of Buildbox 4 includes one of the software’s more recent features, an AI assistant for creating assets and building game logic. The most powerful aspect of the tool is similar to Unity’s AI, which doesn’t replace the traditional game engine interface but streamlines the processes that already exist. Instead of performing repetitive tasks or creating a solution with code, a prompt to the AI assistant lets the user explain what they want in plain English. For example, iIn Buildbox, a prompt like “add fire at the player’s location” places a particle effect from the asset library at that location. The AI tools are still developing, so it’s exciting to await where Buildbox will be able to take them tool.
Is Buildbox easy?
Buildbox is easy to get started with due to its many built-in templates. The templates include more than visual assets, and they ranginge from full games to prebuilt sets of logic. The assets’ compatibility means even a hobbyist or a kid is able to get started prototyping games with this model. The same modularity means that, while the engine is great for beginners, its strengths drop off for larger and more complex projects.
Each object in the game, including the world itself, has a Mind Map. A Mind Map is a node graph representing the game world’s current state and the logic that glues it together. The fact that all logic and settings are done through this view simplifies the process and works well for users who learn visually. The Mind Map is the default view in Buildbox 3, which begins at minimum with a Start node and a 3D world node. Clicking on the 3D world brings the user to the scene editor, but all changes to game logic occur in the Mind Map editor.
Buildbox builds game logic into preset chunks, which in Buildbox 3 are called Brainboxes. Brainboxes handle physics and movement. The system isn’t as flexible as a solution like Unity, where all functionality of the engine is exposed to code and therefore editable. A node-based solution keeps users to specific movement types, such as an enemy patrolling back and forth or a player character with platformer controls, and physics settings, such as making an object bounce on collision. If customization is needed, a select few nodes are available to edit directly with the Buildbox JavaScript API.
Buildbox isn’t easy for developing large projects considering how complex the Mind Map gets with a large number of entities, but that’s beyond the scope of the software regardless. Buildbox prepackages functionality that’s needed for small, 2D experiences., so tThe implementation of physics systems and rendering isn’t configurable enough to optimize for AAA or large indie titles, but it doesn’t need to be for Buildbox to meet its target.
What are the best games made with Buildbox?
The best games made with Buildbox are top 100 mobile games in the App Store and Google Play. One of Buildbox’s earliest hits was Color Switch, a game that sat at no. 1 in the App Store for over a month after release. While popular, the gameplay was a simple creation of David Reichelt, who didn’t know how to code (and was even color blind). Buildbox is a platform for creating a variety of successful genres, not just a puzzle platformer, and hit games include action games, physics puzzlers, and even visual novels, although editing tools for the visual novels are limited.
The Buildbox 3D template was a strong base for Nite Rider, which reached over 50,000 downloads with its action platformer gameplay. Nite Rider was one of the earliest action games built with Buildbox 3, the first offering to include 3D scenes. Ben Scriven, the creator, is a film editor and producer who didn’t know how to code before creating two games with Buildbox, Nite Rider and Coin Dizzy. Other popular titles using the action template from Buildbox includeare Multi-Impact Smash and Cyber Drive, the latter of which reached over 50,000 downloads.
The simple 2D game creation system developed since Buildbox Classic makes creating puzzle games easy with Buildbox. Last Pocket reached over 50,000 downloads with its clear, simple premise: rotate the level until striking the ball with the pool cue causes it to bounce toward the destination. This test of spatial awareness is similar to Cut the Rope. Other puzzle experiences created with Buildbox include Slip Away, Bloom!, and Wire Bounce, and Bloom!.
Buildbox’s platform Buildbox World allows players to publish and play each other’s Buildbox creations, including narrative-based experiences like the visual novel Kaduma Quest. Players in Kaduma Quest help a chef gather ingredients from a variety of environments including caves, gardens, and open wilderness to complete her dishes. The game is one of Buildbox’s new StoryGames AI creations, which is an AI-assisted tool that allows non-coders and non-artists to generate art and edit text for story-based games. Important to keep in mind is the fact that players must pay to download more than three games, and the games themselves aren’t editable outside of the AI prompts.
Is Buildbox legit?
Buildbox is legit in that they’ve supported their product for many years and developers continue to publish games with the platform. Buildbox started with the partnership between Trey Smith and Nik Rudenko, who beganstarted making games together in 2011. Their success in the mobile market led them to host courses on gameacademy.com, where they also built game creation tools for their elite courses, which were focused on mobile development and quick iteration. Built-in ad implementation, node-based visual scripting, and game-mode templates were created inat this early phase.
The company Buildbox formed in 2014 to support these tools full-time. Color Switch was the first big hit created with Buildbox, as mentioned earlier, which breakingoke records with its >100 million monthly active users. The site currently features 91 games that have made the Top 100 list in the App Store, and, given the continuing popularity of the free-to-play casual market, the number will keep growing.
Buildbox has seen controversy in previous years for its pricing model, however. In 2021, Buildbox announced that the free version of the engineBuildbox would come with a new 30% profit sharing model: — 30% to the developers, that is, and 70% to Buildbox. The profit sharing was still rather steep for the Plus plan, which flipped the profit sharing to 30% owed to Buildbox, but also requires a $19.99/month/seat subscription. Buildbox has since worked back that pricing model, but the attempt has left a bad taste in the mouth of some developers, who switched to competitors like Construct.
