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Downpour is a new free experimental mobile game-making tool that allows anyone to make interactive games by stitching together pictures and text on their phone with no programming skills required. You can make a game before your tea gets cold!
Image Credits: V Buckenham, Downpour
Meet Downpour, a new fun, and approachable tool for making games with just your phone for people of any age and background. If you've always wanted to try making a game, but have no prior knowledge of coding or access to a computer, or you're a developer looking to try your hand at something new, this one is for you.
Downpour is an experimental game-making app designed with such accessibility and versatility, that it allows you to make interactive games with no programming or game design skills required, just by stitching together pictures on your phone. It's genuinely quick and easy to use, all you have to do is collage together photos and text, and then easily turn them into an interactive game.
Image Credits: V Buckenham, Downpour
It's not just a game-making tool, it offers new ways to engage with your ideas, capable of revitalizing the relationship with art as there are no rules or algorithms, and the creators can treat it as an interactive journal to engage with existing concepts and ideas, like a self-reflective diary.
Downpour is designed so that you can return to your work, changing it over time and adding details, rather than the constant pressure to post new content.
Its main features include:
- Make a game or website on your phone in minutes
- Add photos, drawings, and writing to create unique custom pages – then link them together
- Customise and style pages and the elements within them
- Easy and accessible – no coding involved
- You don't need the app to play, just a browser
- Follow your friends and get notified when they've made something new
- Download and host elsewhere
- Make games without needing an account
- Works offline – make games anywhere
- The exported games are built on an open-source base
- Optional subscription allows arbitrary links & more uploads
Take a look at the short demo below, a game about a frog made just in 90 seconds, from beginning to end:
The developer has also shared some charming and diverse Downpour-based games:
Image Credits: Holly, Downpour
Image Credits: Susie, Downpour
Image Credits: AngusDick, Downpour
Image Credits: Charlotte, Downpour
This app is made by V Buckenham, an indie game veteran mostly known as the creator of Cheap Bots, Done Quick! Twitter tool. Seeing other people making art brought her joy and with her previous experience, she knew she could provide an approachable tool for that, which motivated her to come up with the idea of Downpour. In fact, the inspiration for it was drawn from Apple Macintosh' HyperCard:
"The idea is that you can be waiting at a bus stop, download [Downpour] and then by the time you get off your bus, at the other end, you'll have made a game and released it. That's the kind of thing I want to be possible.
I guess it’s just kind of saying, it could be so much faster, but of course the things you're going to make are going to be limited. I don't know if you know HyperCard, this ancient MacOS thing, but basically, if you have an image and you can link bits of that image to other images, there's a lot you can do with that. It's very flexible. It also allows you to do your game-making by drawing things on a piece of paper or doing silly faces. That just feels much more tactile than doing it on a computer, and it means you can spend time outside of that.
People have phones, and phones have cameras, so let's use this technology in a way that otherwise you couldn't. I was especially thinking of teenagers who don't necessarily have a nice laptop computer or stuff like that, so managing to make that accessible to people who just have phones feels important."
Downpour is free to download and use. You can make games without creating an account, but you need an account to upload games or follow other users.
There is an optional monthly subscription for $4.99, which unlocks the ability to link to webpages outside of Downpour, and removes limits on how many images you can upload per month.
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