Creation Kits Based on the 80's EA Game Creation Utilities

Here's another potential game development system that might be a good fit with the gamelab kids: the Adventure Construction Kit. It's a GUI-based app that lets you easily build top-down 2D adventure titles, using either GUI-only authoring or scripting for more complicated examples. It's based on the excellent (if primitive) Adventure Construction Set that was released by Electronic Arts in 1985, apparently with the encouragement and mentorship of the original's author. If it's anything like the original, it will be relatively easy to use after a little bit of exploration. It comes with pre-made tile sets for different genres.

The original Adventure Construction Set was itself an outgrowth of the first Electronic Arts game making offering, the Pinball Construction Set, which was itself a groundbreaking title. Apparently, LittleWing, makers of some good pinball sims, are working on their own pinball construction game, and the core language they developed to make it, Ypsilon, has been released.

Both of these construction sets would probably be nice resources to have for the game lab.