Constructor Guide Part 1: Constructor’s Interface and Setting Up

So you want to try building your own interiors for Marble Blast? Constructor is definitely a way to do that! This is a multi-part guide that will help explore the many functions of Constructor, starting with the very basics (including setting up) and building towards some more complicated and niche techniques, and exporting your maps and putting them into PlatinumQuest.

With the GarageGames site no longer available, you can find working copies of Constructor for both Windows and macOS both pinned in the #level-building channel in the community Discord and at the links below.

Windows: Constructor 1.0.6
Mac: Constructor 1.0.4

Shoutout to Threefolder for writing the previous Constructor tutorials on the forums, which just needed some updating and modernizing.

Let’s get started! Before we begin building, we should check out what we’re looking at:

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This is the default interface of Constructor. There’s quite a bit to look at here, but there are only a handful of things that you’ll actually use on a normal basis when building your levels. Below is another screenshot of the interface, but everything that’s listed has been numbered for convenience.


Tackling everything on the left side first, starting up top in the Tools window. Pretty much everything you find here is related to making something.
1. These are the buttons to create brushes, which are the building blocks of your level. The only button here that is used is Build Cube, the one on the very left. You’re totally free to use any of the other five options, but Build Cube goes a very long way to the point where that should be your main focus.
2. This is the Add Point Entity button. The primary use of this is to make moving platforms, which will be covered later on.
3. There are five tabs to the right: Create, Modify, User, Prefab, and View. The latter four have other features that will be more useful later on after you’ve gotten comfortable with the fundamentals of Constructor. Especially in the beginning, you’ll find yourself sticking to the Create tab the most, given that’s where the Build Cube button is.

Lower down is the Properties window, where we’ll focus on the Preferences tab for now. The Tool and Object tabs will come into play once you start building. There are three things to mention here:

4. This is your grid spacing. Keep this at a power of 2 at (almost) all times (0.125, 0.25, 0.5, 1, 2, etc.), and usually it’s best to think of 0.5 as the “default”.
5. Scroll down and you’ll find the free camera option for the 3D Perspective View, which should always be kept on.
6. This is your movement speed for the 3D Perspective View. 10 is fairly comfortable as a default, but there’s no harm in increasing or decreasing this for particularly larger or smaller levels.

The method of Brush Selection is at the bottom, which can either be controlled by clicking the buttons or pressing 1, 2, and 3 on your keyboard.
7. Vertices will only allow you to select the corners of your brushes, which is useful for making shapes that are not rectangular.
8. Faces will allow you to select a single side of a brush so you can move it or apply a texture to it.
9. Brushes allows you to select and move whole brushes, or apply a texture to all of its faces.

At the top of the screen, right in the middle, are the Viewport Settings, which you can find in the top left of any view you have open.
10. The left drop-down is the point of view, where you can choose to move around in a 3D perspective or see your level in a 2D view.
11. The middle drop-down is how your level shows up in the Constructor - most of the time, you should keep this at Textured.
12. The right drop-down is the shading options, which you can turn on to give your map some lighting effects. This doesn’t actually change how your level looks in-game, and having them turned off gives your map the same amount of lighting on every side, which is usually best when you’re building your level.
13. There are a few handy buttons over on the top right as well. From left to right, you can maximize and re-shrink the respective viewport (far and away the most commonly used out of these), focus on a selected brush, freely rotate your camera, move your camera without rotating it, and zoom in and out.

A couple more miscellaneous things to mention:
14. On the edges of each of the Viewports are the Viewport Bounds. By clicking and dragging them, you can make one big viewport, or have two medium-sized viewports, or have a 2-by-2 formation like I have right now, or whatever you prefer. I find myself using these four viewports at least some of the time, and I will often maximize whichever one I’m currently focused on.
15. This is the selection info. You can see how many brushes you have selected at a time, and the bottom numbers are your current grid spacing versus the current scale of the grid.
16. This shows the level that you’re currently editing. If you have more than one project open at a time, you can open the drop-down menu and change maps.

Finally, the Materials window has everything you’ll need to know about the textures you’re using.
17. The Browse button will pull up the Texture Browser.
18. The Apply button applies the current texture to the brush or the face you have selected.

That is just about everything that will be most handy to you now, and while there’s still plenty to point out, the later parts will cover those things. Stay with the Materials window on the right side, where you can set up the texture you’ll use to build your levels.

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The copies of Constructor provided at the beginning are already set up with the textures that you will need. There is a folder and an album for Marble Blast Gold, Ultra, Platinum, PlatinumQuest, and even one for the extra multiplayer textures. If you plan to only make levels for those four games, where you won’t need to add any more textures, you can skip the rest of this section of the guide and find a link at the end for the part that dives into building. On the flipside, knowing how to do this will be helpful if you either want to add textures from different games, add your own textures, or if you simply just want the knowledge.

This explanation will only include instructions for installing Gold textures, mainly because those are the textures I’ll be using for the entire guide. If you’re able to install the Gold textures correctly following these steps, you’ll be able to do the same for the other mods. It is important that you don't mix and match mods though. Keeping the folders separate prevents a situation where Constructor has to decide which of several different edge_white2 textures to use.

First thing’s first. Create a new folder in your main Constructor directory where you’ll store the Gold textures and your Gold-themed levels. We have to go fetch the textures from the PlatinumQuest game files, which can most easily be found by using the launcher, and going to the Settings tab to find the “Open game files” button. Once the file window opens up, go to platinum/data/interiors_mbg to find the textures. Copy all of those into the folder you just made.


Return to Constructor and open the Texture Browser by clicking the Browse button in the Materials window. These six buttons in the bottom left are the main focus of this new window. From left to right, you have:
1. Create a new album.
2. Edit the name of an album.
3. Delete an album.
4. Add a texture to an album
5. Add a folder of textures to an album.
6. Delete a texture from an album.

Create an album for the Marble Blast Gold textures. It is crucial that you DO NOT include any spaces in the name of your album or it will not work. It’s best to stick with a simple name like “Gold” or “MBG”.


There are two ways to add textures: either one-by-one, or from an entire folder. Obviously we want to add the entire folder of textures we have into this album all at once rather than individually, so hit the fifth button to bring up the window that will set you up to find the folder you made with the textures. Be patient while the textures load! Constructor will probably freeze for a few moments as it works, but as long as you don’t do anything, soon enough you’ll see everything added.


When you’re finished adding textures, hit Close, and now you should be fully set up. With a basic understanding of the Constructor’s default interface, and all of the textures imported for use, you can move onto building a level.

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Next Part: Basic Building and Polishing