Gaming News Instead of scrolling through the networks for an hour, you can spend your free time creating mini-games
Downpour, an English-language application recently opened to the public, allows you to create mini-games on your smartphone from your photos.
Downpour first came to mind when I read an article by journalist Keith Stuart for The Guardian. I have not seen any mention of this application in the French-language media and yet it is available for download in our territory. This is perhaps also because it is still very new and has not yet managed to win the hearts of the public. And yet the potential seems quite obvious when you read the arguments of Alexis Ong, writer for The Verge, who also took part in the game: “I created a (fictional) adventure game in Downpour called Dragon Me To Hell, which involved communicating with my grandmother’s deceased dog, possibly committing a petty crime, and escaping to freedom.”
The principle is relatively simple: you can create an image collage from your own photo roll, then add text and save everything as a page. In this direction, several pages must then be created and then combined into a minimalist point’n-click, thanks to transparent boxes that serve as hyperlinks and lead from one page to the other. Your creation, worthy of the greatest, can then be shared with the whole world for everyone’s happiness.
A source of creativity on Downpour
To understand more concretely how everything works, it is interesting to delve into the creations of users around the world, available to you in a special tab. My favorite mini-game so far involved frantically pressing a dog’s nose to see new photos of him appear in different contexts. Another mini-game offered me a parade of photos of Javier Bardem, an invitation I can never refuse. The site listing all these amateur productions is a bit chaotic, but in a good way. We can appreciate a nice variety of different fonts and artistic directions posted by such different profiles. The atmosphere reminds me a little of the glitter GIF creation tools we used in the good old days of Skyblog.
(But) people like chaos! They try to pack as much clutter as possible into the little boxes that platforms like X and Instagram offer them. Rainfall therefore allows them to wreak as much havoc as they want. I want people to fill the page with the things they want to do and connect those pages together in idiosyncratic ways. – v, application developer.
As you have probably understood, Downpour is not a concrete alternative to a complete video game creation tool. We’re far from a Dreams experience, it’s just a quick conversation that you can use between three or four subway stops or in your dentist’s waiting room to relieve the pressure from the painful scaling that awaits you . But it is also very useful to compensate for a somewhat abusive practice that affects almost all of us: the unwanted scrolling on social networks like TikTok and X, from which we usually emerge exhausted. It is also an interesting alternative to the image editing tools we are used to in our daily lives. And I’m pretty sure no one expects you to send them an interactive picture of your pooch. Then it inevitably increases your creative spirit a little.
An app created by a developer
The app was created by V, a solo developer based in London. The idea would have come to her while she was trying to do her best Create a game from hand-drawn illustrations using the technologies at your disposal. The Guardian article states: “So she thought: We all have these powerful, intuitive computers in our pockets all day. Why not use it to create simple games?“. The app is inspired by flat games, those very simple 2D games usually played on mobile screens or a television. Note that the creator already has an extensive resume, having worked at Niantic (Pokémon GO), Ingress and Sensible Object. She is also the creator of some interactive tools such as Cheap Bots and Done Quick that allow you to create automated Twitter accounts.
I see games as part of this larger landscape of creative technology, interactive media, whatever you want to call it. Games are part of it, but creative tools are also part of it. Or even objects that don’t fit into either category. I always like things that are in the confusion between two things.
