Game news Instead of scrolling the networks for 1 hour, you can spend your free time creating mini-games
Downpour, an English-speaking application recently made available to the public, allows you to create mini-games on your smartphone from your photos.
It was while reading an article by journalist Keith Stuart for The Guardian that Downpour first occurred to me. I have not seen any mention made to this application in the French-speaking media and yet, it is available for download in our territory. It is perhaps also because it is very recent and has not yet had time to win the hearts of the public. And yet, the potential seems quite obvious when reading the arguments of Alexis Ong, author for the media The Verge, who also took part in the game: “I created a (fictional) adventure game in Downpour called Dragon Me To Hell, which involved communing with my grandmother’s late dog, possibly committing a small crime, and escaping to freedom.”
The principle is relatively simple: From your own roll of photographs, you can create a collage of images, then add text and save everything as a page. Several pages must then be created in this direction and then must be linked together to form a minimalist point’n click thanks to transparent boxes which serve as hyperlinks and take you from one page to another. Your creation worthy of the greatest can then be shared with the whole world for the happiness of all.
A well of creativity on Downpour
To understand more concretely how everything works, it is interesting to delve into the creations of users around the world, left at your disposal in a dedicated tab. My favorite mini-game so far has been 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 that can never be refused. The page which lists all these amateur productions is slightly chaotic, but in a good way. We can appreciate a nice variety of different fonts and artistic directions, posted by profiles as different as each other. The atmosphere reminds me a little of those glitter gif creation tools that we used in the good old days of Skyblog.
(But) People like mess! They try to put as much disorder as possible into the little boxes that platforms like X and Instagram offer them. Downpour therefore allows them to make as much mess as they want. I want to let people fill the page with the things they want to do, connect these pages together in an idiosyncratic way. – v, application developer.
As you will have understood, Downpour is not a concrete alternative to a complete video game creation tool. We are far from a Dreams experience, it is only a short entertainment to use between three or four metro stops or in your dentist’s waiting room, to relieve the pressure before the painful scaling who is waiting for you. But it’s also very useful to compensate for a somewhat abusive practice that concerns almost all of us: the unwanted scrolling of social networks like TikTok and X from which we generally come out feeling exhausted. It is also an interesting alternative to the image editing tools that we are used to using in our daily lives. And I’m pretty sure no one expects you to send them an interactive image of your pooch. Then, it also necessarily boosts your creative spirit a little.
An app created by a developer
The app is created by V, a solo developer based in London. The idea would have come to her while she was trying as best she could to create a game from hand-drawn illustrations with the technologies at your disposal. The Guardian article says: “So she thought: We all have these powerful, intuitive computers in our pockets all day. Why not use them to create simple games?”. The app is inspired by flatgames, these very simple 2D games, generally played on mobile screens or a television. Note that the creator already has an extensive CV, having already worked at Niantic (Pokémon GO), Ingress and Sensible Object. She is also at the origin of some interactive tools like Cheap Bots, Done Quick which allows 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 just as much a part of it. Or even objects that do not fit into either category. I always like things that are in the mess between two things.