Though the company is still unsure when or even if the project will see mass market release, Project GB gives players the skills of game development -- programming, graphic design, music composition, and writing -- all through hands-on play, hoping, in the end to "nurture a true 'game brain,'" the project's namesake, specifically chosen to counteract media reports of a popular Japanese university professor's term for the damaging effects of games on the brain.
The short demo of Project GB, still very early in development, showed a fascinating set of tutorials allowing players to directly edit sprites, compose animations, and change gameplay parameters to test balance of a simple Space Invaders type game, and promised to allow players who wanted more depth access to both direct logic and framework, and even low level code.
Tsushima said that throughout serious game making, developers should never use the game simply to sugarcoat the learning process, that learning isn't something bitter players must swallow, but instead games should be directly and effectively communicating the fun of learning itself.
That's why serious game development is difficult, Otobe concluded. "Without understanding the fun of learning, you can't create a game, you can only sugarcoat. You have to access yourself the core-fun of what you're trying to educate, and communicate that through gaming."
That, Otobe said, is the most important message to be taken away from Square Enix's serious efforts, and something serious game developers should always be thinking about.
