A template approach was attempted in GBSB. Authors were given the complete structure of a SCC GBS with working SCC content in it so they could play the entire game inside the tool. If they were building a program about identifying gems, they could swap out the SCC movie that introduced the worried couples with their own introduction movie about a worried client with an unidentified gem. They could then swap out each expert video with their own expert videos, swap out SCC test pictures and video for their own test pictures and video, SCC results for their own results, and so forth until they had built an entirely new GBS that had the exactly the same architecture (down to the placement of buttons and the size of the graphics) as SCC, only with different content.
Authors could click back and forth between their work-in-progress and SCC to see what SCC designers did, and were encouraged directly by the tool's built-in help to copy SCC's design ideas.
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Non-experts in GBS design could easily pull out a list of parts they needed to author by looking at the template as a whole. A handy utility generated a list of movies to shoot, pictures to draw, and where in the GBS authors needed to design questions and answers. Authors could rapidly prototype these SCC clones in very little time (perhaps a month or two).
Authors had very little freedom, which meant they could make few design mistakes. SCC, during its long gestation, had many design issues resolved and many flaws uncovered and removed. By using GBSB, truly novice authors could build a GBS without worrying about these already-solved problems.
Numerous authors, a substantial fraction of which were non-programmers, built prototypes of many programs in GBSB over several years of development. They worked on topics ranging from police investigative work to archaeology. GBSB was a true GBS tool--it took content created by authors and organized it into a coherent program. It also enabled rapid prototyping of GBSes of the same general structure. There was even a limited mode where authors could take a GBS definition file and run it without the rest of the tool.