Garry's Mod (as a game development "platform") essentially boils down to a Lua interpreter bolted to the Source Engine, with access to assets from Valve's games. If you want to make a new game(mode) in Garry's Mod, you still have to write code, design levels and possibly create models, textures and sounds in separate somewhat hard to use programs.

That's very different from Dreams, where you can create everything within the same program with a unified set of pretty accessible tools and a very fast iteration cycle.

The limited nature can also make them appealing. A lot of the charm in Mario Maker 2 is the clever things people come up with within the restrictions.

The really enthusiastic creators _really_ learn how the editor and game engine works, for example this document goes into detail about how to take advantage of a quirk of the engine to pull off elaborate constructs:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1RlBSyS8WcW4S9NIHG0lGjWkN...

Was wondering if this was going to be SALTI. We must hang out in the same discord. ;)

Roblox was pretty interesting in that it has this built in game editor that is very accessible, but is also highly extensible through Lua so the players/builders can ramp up their skills over time.

Add to that it's marketplace. Many users will never using the building tools and just play games made by other players. Not entirely unique, I was doing Unreal mods decades ago, but the way it is all presented and the varying levels of accessibility are still compelling.

StarCraft's map editor was another big one in the late 90's

Don't forget WarCraft 3. It spawned Tower Defense and DOTA

StarCraft 1 had Tower Defense maps as well. Much more cobbled together than what you could do in WC3, but impressive given the limitations.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aeuNWZXN6RI

so this game contains an impressive audio/music tools , nice sculpting tools, logic widgets. like I helped my 13 years old son rotate an object in space by connecting some velocity vectors, sin wave widgets (there is no way to input polynomials or trigonometric functions that we found, so you have a sign wave and you change it's shape to look like what you need ). widgets to record data(aka variables) event like things. Then it has sharing. My son played the other games from this team Little Big Planet, he is not into programming (I tried to teach him basic stuff but code syntax is too abstract and error prone) where this kind of games encourage experimenting ... it is not something for developers to create games so is not a Unity/Unreal competitor

Wonder whether microbit with weatherbit may help. It is quite interesting to have done physical (even if just barometer but better with the weather station part) to see how things interact.

I found the block language and (non mit phone) part interesting as well.

Not expensive give a try.