From garage tinkerer to professional Maker in Chief

This free game lets you slowly upgrade a scruffy tinkering garage into a professional maker lab. From garage tinkerer to professional Maker in Chief, now as a game. You can’t open a news site at the moment without AI being blamed for something — taking jobs, doing pupils’ homework, orchestrating the death of the internet… Some of that is fair, but one thing tends to get lost in the noise, and it’s the thing that got most of us into computing and making in the first place: You can have fun with this stuff.

So I used it to make a game called Maker Lab. It runs on an iPhone, is free to download on the App Store, and took twelve days during my recent staycation to go from an empty folder to a finished build. I did not write the code by hand; I described what I wanted, played what came back, and said what was wrong.

The Maker Lab main menu What the game is If you’ve played Overcooked, you know the shape of it. Except instead of a kitchen, you’re running a makerspace. Customers turn up at the hatch wanting things made: a keyring, an engraved coaster, a drone frame.

You have 3D printers, a laser cutter, a CNC mill, a couple of hand benches, and exactly one pair of hands.