Well, of course it's important to have fun making games, but we also wanted people to have the experience of completing each function of the game to the end.

Making a game itself is fun, but completing each step of a lesson offers us a sense of accomplishment. And above all, the moment of completion is already fun. As a developer, I think this is one of the most interesting aspects of programming, and I want our users to experience the same feeling. We heard people say, "I couldn't get to the end with the tutorials” for other programming software. That's why with this software, I wanted to make sure that people would finish making the games in the lessons by repeating the experience of these small moments of completion.

Something happened to me that inspired me to convey the fun of completing a project and having that sense of accomplishment. I had visited the Nintendo Labo Toy-Con Garage VR hands-on event. We had beginners try out some simple programming, combining the control stick node and the person node to make the person move using the control stick. Then, when the character started to move, there was a big "Whoa!” in the hall, like a boom. We were surprised by this reaction! (laughs)

Yes. I didn't know that people who had never programmed before would be so impressed by the fact that they could make things work with their own programming! I was really impressed by that experience. I stayed conscious of this experience in the development of this game.

I myself feel that the experience of doing the work and seeing something slowly come together is interesting. I had the thought to create something that would get people to experience that feeling right up until the end. In programming, there is a learning method commonly known as "sutra copying".⁽⁴⁾ It’s an effective method, so we referenced it.

Yes. But one thing that tends to happen in scripting is that it is hard to notice if you enter something wrong, and if there is an input error, the program won't run. Of course, finding out for yourself where you've gone wrong is a very useful way to learn programming, but I thought that this software should use a guided system so that you don't get lost in typing mistakes, pushing that moment of completion to the forefront.

Correct. The individual steps of the seven interactive lessons are each designed to be completed in about five minutes, with each lesson gradually moving on step-by-step. By finishing the steps and having these incremental experiences, players will gradually get closer to making and finishing their own game.

Each new lesson is based on the content of the previous lesson, but it is not necessary to recall the content of the previous lesson in order to proceed. We tried to avoid situations where you need to recall from memory, so that you can move on if you just simply follow the instructions on the spot.

As a matter of fact, there was a question of whether the instructions for each lesson should be increasingly hands-off and vague as the lesson levels increase, to give the users more freedom to understand the programming on their own and for the knowledge to stick. However, it would do no good if we used a hands-off approach and hid the instructions only to have the player give up, not knowing how to make the game.

That's right. With this game, too, we paid attention to the structure of the software so that players wouldn’t make mistakes and would be able to complete the games by themselves. That’s the structure we had in mind. Also, between lessons, there are puzzle-like problems called "checkpoints", where you can see that you have understood and completed the task by yourself.