BBC launches Doctor Who Game Maker to help teach principles of game design

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-travelling doctor.

For the uninitiated, Doctor Who is a British science fiction series first produced by the BBC in 1963, and has emerged as one of the BBC’s most popular exports.

Earlier this year, BBC Worldwide — the BBC’s commercial arm — released a 10-episode Doctor Who box set as a $12 BitTorrent bundle, marking the first major network distribution partnership by BitTorrent, and the first time a collection of episodic content was delivered via the platform.

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 audiences in the U.K. With Doctor Who Game Maker, however, the BBC is opening things up to international users, as 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.

Above: Make a Game

Image Credit: BBC

You can choose a myriad of elements to include in the game, such as your character (that you will control), enemies, and which 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 toward 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 [introduce] them to game design.” In other words, it complements the network’s 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 have created. These games will also be playable on mobile phones.