As with nearly any creative hobby, the best place to start with coding is to start with small tweaks and modifications where you can see instant results whilst learning the principles and ideas for why coding works the way it does.

Some of the most popular games are not only fun in their own right but allow you the chance to develop variations and even whole new games from them, from a Minecraft modding course to the game creation platform Roblox.

Beyond these two groundbreaking and world-beating games, there are so many other games where the goal is to be creative and learn coding principles. Here are some of the most interesting.

Garry’s Mod

When Half-Life 2 was released in 2004, it altered a lot of perceptions of what video games could be due to its extensive use of advanced physics thanks to the Source Engine and Havok physics, which could be used to pick up and throw around objects and characters in a way never seen before.

It didn’t take long for the playing around by itself to become the main appeal, and in 2004, Garry’s Mod was first released by programmer Garry Newman.

Much like Roblox, it is both a creative sandbox and a way to play other games, most famously the hide-and-seek game Prop Hunt.

Fortnite Creative

The massive success of Fortnite Battle Royale has for quite a few people hidden the fact that the highly popular elimination mode is only a small part of what the game was originally designed to be.

The original game, Fortnite: Save The World, was intended to be a tower defence game that merged the building gameplay of Minecraft with the third-person shooting of Gears of War and was part of an infamously troubled development before a quickly developed Battle Royale mode took off.

In 2018, the creative part of Fortnite was brought back to the forefront with the Creative mode, becoming a sandbox for players to create new levels and even whole new games.