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Best Customizable Games

Create your own gaming experience with the best customizable games.

By Patricia SarkarPublished 8 years ago 8 min read
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Aspiring game designers can try their hand at game creation with more games offering tools than ever before. These are the games that let you make your own games. We’ve scoured through the list of the most feature-rich customizable games ever to be made available to the public. Maybe with these tools at your disposal you can become the next Shigeru Miyamoto or even a new gaming super star like Toby Fox.

If you ever played one of the classic Mario games and wanted to try your own hand at a bit of game design, here's your chance. Super Mario Maker gives you all the classic blocks, enemies, and traps to construct your own level to share with friends. You can build in as much complexity as you want. The freedom to make what you want highlights just how much thought went into some of those early games. Of course, those creators were trying for something that could be played by children. If you really want to see how brutal this customization game can get, go look up the level called "Pit of Panga: P Break."

When the tagline for your game is "Play, Create, Share," you'd better be ready to back it up with some serious customization capability built into your game. Not only can you build the platform you've always dreamed of, you can customize the look and feel of the game as well, giving you an exceptional amount of control over almost every aspect of your creation. You can even buy costume packs for everything from Mass Effect and The Justice League to SpongeBob Squarepants. The only thing you can't do is change how creepy that mascot is. Seriously, what's with that zipper?

Disney Infinity is what you get when you cross pollinate game design and marketing. The game, of course, has a customizable toy box mode, allowing you to create your own games and environments which is pretty cool. But why give those game design tools away when you can sell them? Disney Infinity is linked with a set of collectable figures, and the more you buy the more tools you have at your disposal. Disney’s empire is vast, and so is the list of figures you can buy, featuring not only Disney characters but every major property Disney owns such as Marvel, Star Wars, and Pixar characters.

Get a little lost in Mario Maker? Having trouble striking a balance between challenging and playable when you’re trying to design that perfect level? Then take a step back and get back to basics. The concept of the game is that Wario has hired you as an employee of his painfully understaffed company, meaning you’ll be responsible for pretty much everything. Wario Ware allows you to construct minigames, but more importantly, it acts as a tutorial on what constitutes good game design. It lets you go through everything from music to mechanics. When you’re done, you can send the finished product off to your friends.

There's only so much you can really do with a racing game, so you won't exactly be reinventing the wheel, if you'll forgive the pun, but ModNation Racers gives you everything and anything in that range of possibility. You can modify characters, vehicles, and tracks at will, painting roads where you want them and dropping scenery to make the perfect loop for you and your friends to race on. You can even dump obstacles and shortcuts into the course to make things a little more interesting if you find that complete control over hairpin turns and jumps to be just a little too tame for you.

Halo Forge is exactly what you'd expect it to be: tools to construct custom levels and game types for first person shooter mayhem. Halo Forge isn't designed to let you flex your creative muscles nearly as much as some of the other games on this list. You won't be creating player objectives or making an environment that the player has to fight. Forge is a map maker, plain and simple. The goal is not to make a complete game for someone to run through but to make a new map for you and your friends to tear through when you play against each other. But the possibilities of what you can create in Forge are nearly limitless. Just browse through some of the stuff people have made and you can begin to understand the possibilities.

Nintendo does loves its puzzle games, and they're passing that love straight to you in Mario Vs. Tipping Stars. The customization portion of this game gives you all the tools you'll need to create up to fifty individual custom levels to torment your friends with. The game takes on something of an over complex Rube Goldberg machine feel as you use sprockets, springs, gears, cogs, and pipes to tinker your way to victory. It might not be quite what you'd expect out of a game featuring an overweight plumber and a giant ape, but it certainly has its charm.

How much do you miss old school JRPGS of your childhood? Enough to design your own epic 16 bit adventure? Well, with RPG Maker VX, you can do exactly that. This game features everything you need to bring your dreams to life in glorious old school retro-style graphics. Build the perfect tavern for the start of your journey. Design your own boss fight. Or go beyond just role playing games because with a little tweaking you can use RPG Maker to make an adventure game or even graphic novels, just so long as you don’t worry too much about the art.

Skyrim can be addictive. Really addictive. With its open world sandbox approach to gaming, you could sink enough time into this game to let it consume your life. But just like any game, play long enough, and you run into limits. Unless you venture into custom content. Bethesda has given players enough control over the game to create your very own expansion with hours of gameplay, quests, and even new lands to explore. Now, not only can you sink more of your life into Skyrim as you design your very own adventures, you can explore expansions created by other players, too.

Are you a GLaDOS or a Wheatly? You can find out with the Perpetual Testing Initiative, a downloadable expansion to Portal 2 that allows the player to edit maps and create their own puzzles. It’s up to you to decide how mean spirited or goofy you want to get with the idea. Of course, you won’t have the near infinite control you might find in Skyrim. It’s a simple editor where you can drop a number of predetermined testing apparatus into a blank testing chamber. Everything is block based though, so if you want to work with curves or angles that aren’t a right angle, you won’t be able to. Still, you can get fairly complex once you get good with it.

There are no words. If you have the patience and dedication, Minecraft will let you do it, whatever it happens to be. Want to make a giant working machine? Minecraft will let you do it. Want to build a castle? Sure, why not. Kings Landing? Yeah, go for it. Art? Create your masterpiece. Anything, and I mean anything, including a working computer complete with RAM is pretty much free game here. As long as you have the free time, you can do it in Minecraft. You can make it as simple or as complex as you want, and that’s the beauty of Minecraft.

Fallout 4 isn’t exactly the easiest game to mod. There’s character customization on top of character customization, but for the longest time, Bethesda’s sci-fi compliment to Elder Scrolls was without a modding option. Of course, all that changed with the release of the Creation Engine for Fallout 4. Creation Engine is Bethesda’s successor to the older Gamebryo, and gives Fallout 4 players the same level of customizability that Skyrim players revel in. So now, whether you’re designing a quest to slay dragons with a magic sword or fend off a horde of super intelligent ants with your trusty plasma rifle, you can trust Bethesda to give you the tools to do it right.

Guncraft is more or less Minecraft for people with a military fetish or really anyone who was playing Minecraft and thought, "This is great and all, but wouldn’t it be awesome if I could cram Call of Duty into this?" A blocky first person shooter, Guncraft lets you customize pretty much everything from classes to environment. Where Minecraft gives you the option to build anything and everything you want, Guncraft gives you something of a purpose, even if that purpose is designing something to blow up with your friends. Guns, environment, classes, and pretty much anything you can think of is up for grabs, so you can mod away to your heart’s content. And when you’re done, go online and shoot it all to pieces.

Ark: Survival Evolved gives you the option to modify quite a bit about a game, affecting game balance however you see fit. You can increase or decrease points per level up to make the game easier or harder, based on whether you want to try to solo the game or not. You can also control the resident dino population by altering spawn rates, and what spawns where. Adjustments to taming and dino stats are available as well, and you can even adjust resource spawning, allowing you to control when items spoil, when they drop, and everything in between. While it might not be quite the level of available customization for other games on the list, you still have quite a few options open.

What is there to say about Garry’s Mod, the granddaddy of all customizable content? You can do pretty much anything you want with Garry’s Mod, which allows players to make sprawling maps, custom content, machinima, or anything else you want. The depth of content available was and still is amazing, allowing for pretty much anything you want to mix and match from Half Life 2 or Team Fortress. This is pretty much the package that sets the standards for any customizable sandbox style set of tools for any game on the market. The fact that it’s been around for so long only highlights just how innovative it really is.

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About the Creator

Patricia Sarkar

Raised on a steady diet of makeup and games. Eager to share my experiences with the world and make a difference, article by article! :)

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