Downpour is a design tool for more approachable games

V Buckenham opened the Downpour application during Friday’s Zoom call and, in just a few moments, was playing a game. Buckenham captured our faces and took a selfie. With a few taps on their phone, Buckenham linked these photos together and built a small game out of them — not their most interesting game, sure, but an interactive experience nonetheless.

“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,” Buckenham said. “That’s the kind of thing I want to be possible.”

Buckenham founded Downpour Limited. This community of creators makes game design tools that are more easily accessible, accessible, and creative. They said it’s not necessarily the singular future of video games, but one of many futures: an option for creators looking to do something different, not a replacement for traditional game-making methods.

Polygon spoke to Buckenham via Zoom last week to chat about this community of creators making new tools — including Downpour, which Buckenham hopes will come out this year.

[Ed. note: This interview has been edited for length and clarity.]

Polygon: I’d love to start by hearing about you and your history in the video game industry.

V Buckenham: I’ve been around the games industry for about 10 years, around the indie space. Ich worked for Die Gute Fabrik. Mutazione, which you might know — many, many years ago, because that was in development for years. Sensible Object was a company I worked for on a game called Beasts of BalanceThis was a combination of a physical and digital stacking game. Niantic bought the company, and I was able to work on things that are still unknown.

I worked there for long enough to make money and save some money. I quit to pursue my own interests. Since then I’ve been working on a couple of things, but the main thing I’ve been working on is Downpour. The other thing, which is not actually video games, but it’s pretty relevant to Downpour, is that I was involved in the Twitter bot community around five to seven years ago and made a site called Cheap Bots Done Quick. There’s, like, tens of thousands of people using it to host Twitter bots. That’s my biggest, most notable creative tool. I think the fact that I’d made that gives me a lot of confidence that I can make something and it’s going to find users. It’s going to enable a wave of people to do things they otherwise wouldn’t do.

Image: Downpour

What’s Downpour? It works in two ways.

Downpour can be used to create and share games easily. It is possible to download while waiting for a bus, and then wait until it arrives. [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. This allows you to make your own game by drawing or making funny faces on a piece paper. This is much easier than using a computer to do it, and you have more time. 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.

The bit that’s missing from this [right now]This button can be pressed and it will upload to my servers. You can then share the file. [your game] immediately. There’s loads of other features I need to focus on, but that’s the foundation of it.

How important is game design to you? Downpour is a tool that builds on other tools such as Bitsy or Twine.

Honestly, with all the things going on right now, I don’t know if I can justify it as actually important. But I do know it’s cool to see people making stuff. There’s joy in that. And if I can make people make more things … the feeling of making an approachable tool and someone does something with it, and you’re like, ‘Wow, that’s really cool. I would have never thought of that.’ I feel like I can take some small amount of credit in that. That’s hard to beat … the kind of joy you see in other people, and seeing that kind of impact. That’s great.

Are you convinced that accessible game-making tools will be the future? What’s next?

No, I mean, it’s a future. The go-to answer here is that there’s clearly going to continue to be expensive things. Indie games in particular categories are becoming more costly to produce. But there’s also people making things that weren’t here before, but that feels like a thing.

So, you know, I don’t know. RobloxIs it possible to go in both directions at once? It’s easier than ever to make a game. There are professionalized games. All this can be coexist, I believe.

You showed the tool to You can now play thisDid you find any new or unusual games, experiences or activities that resulted from this? This must have been exciting.

Yes, there were some cool stuff. The first was stop-motion. There’s one that’s like, just basically a turtle going through a door. Another one that’s slightly cheating, because it was done by Joe who is one of the organizers of Now Play This, who was able to detach the tablet and wander around with it. He basically did a walkthrough through the festival. There’s a thing about taking pictures in 3D space, like it’s a 3D scan of your environment that you can walk around in, like the kind of thing people did with that weird house that was a warehouse that was previously a church. That was something I did. VR Chat.

There’s that, and then there’s the low-tech thing of taking photos and linking it together and getting that weird, actually really 3D sense of being in a space. It’s quite amazing that this is possible.

Is there anything that you’ve made using Downpour that you’re particularly proud of?

This thread was my idea. [of games]It’s a way for me to make it happen. Because once I’m making it, I’m in tunnel mode and it’s hard to shift to actually using it. The one I’m probably most proud of is the Pluto one, just because I think blink comparators are really cool, just using that technique and flicking between code and seeing what’s changed. It’s great to be able share this stuff.

Also, I’m not necessarily recommending anyone looks at it, [but I made one when]A tooth was removed from me. It was a bit of an accident. I took pictures and used them in my personal journal. It has a certain amount of playfulness in just, ‘Don’t click here,’ and then you click here, and making that approachable. I’m on Mastodon, and it was definitely an inspiration for this kind of thing being on there and seeing the way that the content warning feature can be used for jokes. Here’s the set-up, and you’ve got to click a button. You will see the punchline when you click on the button. You are responsible for making the punchline fun by clicking the button. The ability to make jokes is quite inspirational.

You’ve talked a bit before about Flatgamesas an inspiration for the tool. I’d never heard the term flatgames before. Please explain.

Image: Jenny Jiao Hsia

Yeah, this is a movement I’d seen around, and seen some exciting stuff, like some of Llaura [McGee’s]The first games. Flatgame Jam. And Jenny Jiao Hsia’s And i ensured that you kept your head sideways. This game is incredible. But yeah, it’s just just a style of here’s how we can make stuff more approachable, especially in that assets should ideally be made on paper.

It’s great to create things on paper. But then there’s this sticky bit in the middle where I have to get stuff into the computer. Next, I must write Unity scripts. And I can write scripts in Unity, I’m capable of doing that. But it’s annoyingly unapproachable for reasons that feel technical and incidental rather than inherent in the form. We also had flatgame stuff in the past at Now Play This, which was great to watch people really get into. There was an arrangement where people were drawing on sheets of paper. Then, they would scan the drawings using a special tool. It was amazing. The stuff was used to make games. That kind of showing how stuff is made and making it more approachable is great, but at the same time, it’s a shame that people couldn’t make the games themselves. Although it was many years ago, this is what I remember. Ok, it’s possible to make it better.

Do you have any additional information or experience that people might need about the project, such as your own?

Yeah, other than it’s hopefully coming out later this year, it’s that there is a community of people making these creative tools. Nathalie Lawhead [their]These blog posts really convey the spirit of the community. It’s not like I’m pioneering this thing that otherwise wouldn’t exist. I’m doing this because there are some really cool tools. Do you have the tools? Give a shout to sok-storiesThe Sokpop Collective tool. You can draw these tiny things but it has a very constrained drawing interface. And then you’re just dragging and dropping things. Sometimes it becomes a second thing or creates another.