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Downpour is the game creation tool I have been working on for the past few years
- calebio 3y agolet's create Myst in this
- doesnotexist 3y agoExciting! V has a knack for making things that let others make creative things with ease. I'm a big fan of their prior work such as https://cheapbotsdonequick.com/ https://cheapbotsdonequick.com/ It's to bad twitter shutdown api access sunsetting all the amazing works people made with that. Looking forward to what people make with down pour.
- unshavedyak 3y agoSidenote, it's probably just me but i get a headache trying to read that page. The rainbow background is visually too much for me i assume.
- ejb999 3y agoits not just you. Yikes.
- luoc 3y agoBetter don't try it on mobile then ;)
- BlackLotus89 3y agoYou are not alone and in firefox ctrl+alt+r (aka reader mode) it helps
- alex_c 3y agoI just downloaded the app and thoroughly enjoyed playing the first random game I tried - “Where’s Madeleine”: https://downpour.games/~holly/where-s-madeleine https://downpour.games/~holly/where-s-madeleine I really love this. It feels like a throwback to a much simpler time, and manages to capture some of that “early internet” magic!
- bombcar 3y agoThis is HyperCard! And it was surprisingly more difficult than I thought it would be.
- jusgu 3y agoThis is really cute :) thanks for sharing
- throwup238 3y ago> It feels like a throwback to a much simpler time, and manages to capture some of that “early internet” magic! Until you get to the end of the game and it’s advertising a book. Then it feels like the regular internet again :-D Maybe it should be a popup?
- appplication 3y agoThat was fun and honestly I didn’t know cats could be that cute. My cat growing up was very mean :(
- anon115 3y agomaedeline hiding behind the bookshelf is so fucking adorable
- huimang 3y agoTools like this are incredible. Thanks for sharing.
- doctorhandshake 3y agoGetting strong HyperCard vibes off this, which is a beautiful thing
- schazers 3y agogo check out https://castle.xyz/ https://castle.xyz/! it's very inspired by hypercard
- ilkke 3y agoMay I add Decker https://internet-janitor.itch.io/decker https://internet-janitor.itch.io/decker
- v21 3y agoAs the creator of Downpour, I have to say: yes! both of these tools are great. I'd also shout out Bitsy and Twine as two phenomenal simple game making tools.
- ilkke 3y agoGreat job, I am partial to such tools! We used both Bitsy and Twine at work for single-day game jams, as such experience teaches valuable skills. I'll definitely want to use Downpour for the next one.
- araes 3y agoHaving never heard of HyperCard that was a fascinating, I want to say rabbit hole, yet more like metro stop to a well curated museum. Did not realize there was such a short degree of Kevin Bacon between Hypercard and Hypermedia. Ars has an interesting 30 year retrospective [3] where they discuss how Hypercard almost immediately beget Mosaic. > "I got a HyperCard manual and looked at it and just basically took the concepts and implemented them in X-windows" Also some pretty neat commentary from the author Bill Atikinson about realizing how close he had been to developing the entire world wide web browsing experience. > "I grew up in a box-centric culture at Apple. If I'd grown up in a network-centric culture, like Sun, HyperCard might have been the first Web browser. My blind spot at Apple prevented me from making HyperCard the first Web browser." Myst was apparently also a direct decedent. > the Cyan software company originally wrote their hugely popular puzzle/adventure game Myst as a HyperCard stack. Reading back through these, it actually made me wonder a bit at how few storyboard, or still frame games, or click-a-choice adventures there are in web pages. It seems like such an obvious format for Myst, 7th Guest, ect... games where you click and drag objects, and choose buttons or areas to move from Myst scene to Myst scene. Another topic in that vein is Scott McCloud's work with the infinite canvas and Follow That Trail. [4] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HyperCard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HyperCard [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypermedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypermedia [3] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/05/25-years-of-hypercard-the-missing-link-to-the-web/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/05/25-years-of-hypercar... [4] http://www.scottmccloud.com/1-webcomics/icst/icst-4/icst-4.html http://www.scottmccloud.com/1-webcomics/icst/icst-4/icst-4.h...
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- JoeyJoJoJr 3y agoThis is great! Reminds me of Flash point and click games circa 2000.
- Solvency 3y agoThis site is unusable on mobile.
- MattPalmer1086 3y ago[flagged]
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- nottorp 3y agoHmm... okay, it only works on mobiles. Hypercard vibes good. How do I get my work out of my phone? How do I distribute it?
- v21 3y agoEither you make an account and upload your game, getting a downpour.games link you can share. Or you can export the game as a self contained webpage to host elsewhere (it's a zip with an index.html, a JSON file & the required images)
- jarboot 3y agoI really want to sign up and share a creation, but when I do either sign up or sign in, it gives me a firebase url that just redirects me to the app store. I can't find any way to sign up. I'll click "Sign in to Downpour", it will bring me to a "Open link in App?" page, I press "Open", and then it brings me to a "Downpour -- make a game" page and I click open again which brings me to the app store. The app is installed on my phone.
- v21 3y agoCreator here - sorry about this! I've found a few people are running into this, and I'm not sure what the cause is - going to be looking into adding password auth as a workaround, but that will obviously take a hot second.
- gentleman11 3y agoName is maybe a little similar to downpour.fm, a good drm free audiobook site
- geuis 3y agoThanks for the link. Been looking for an alternative to Audible. I take that back. That domain doesn't resolve and google doesn't provide any direct alternate links. Was it an old service acquired or shut down since the last time you used it?
- Wowfunhappy 3y agoPretty sure OP means https://www.downpour.com/ https://www.downpour.com/. Not sure where the .fm came from. Perhaps OP was also thinking of libro.fm, another excellent drm free audiobook store.
- geuis 3y agoThanks that's clearer. But I can't say the quality is very good. Within a minute of looking on the site, I find this book which has the wrong description (uses the desc from an Ian Banks Culture novel.) https://www.downpour.com/the-corporation-wars-insurgence?sp=164552 https://www.downpour.com/the-corporation-wars-insurgence?sp=...
- Wowfunhappy 3y agoThat's weird. For what it's worth, I own 47 books on Downpour and have never had problems with any of them. Libro.fm is great too. I own 14 books there (the number is lower because they haven't been around as long).
- catoc 3y agoI’ve seen one or two other cats on the internet, but Madeleine is now my favourite
- Liquix 3y agoa friendly heads up: the website's background image is 3.2MB. while it doesn't really matter for you (cached) or for HN readers (mostly desktop, mostly high speed internet), for what seems to be the intended demographic - a mobile user on a shoestring budget - 3.2MB to load an abstract pattern is asking a lot. you could replace it with an equivalent CSS/SVG design or run it through something like tinypng. neat project!
- hipadev23 3y agoI backed out of reading it because the mobile experience is so bad. Causes h-scroll and the content is this super narrow div.
- SamBam 3y agoAgree, I couldn't really read it. It seems like probably a cool project though.
- dragonwriter 3y agoOn mobile, I think the website layout (about half of the horizontal area on mobile being the sidebar and gutter, with the main text column a narrow strip on the right) is a bigger problem than the size of the background image. But the tool seems like a cool idea.
- gbraad 3y agoSame comment here. However the psychedelic background nature and that it loads slow is a distraction
- exodust 3y agoEven a conservative JPEG compression gets this image down to about 1.3MB. But the way to go these days is WebP, which gets the image down to 319KB, with compression set to 55.
- v21 3y agohello, creator here, just seeing this thread now. and yes, to be honest i agree with everything you're saying here. it's needed attention for a good while, i've just been busy with getting the app finished & trying to avoid the distraction pit of "fixing up my blog"
- nkrisc 3y agoFor something ostensibly targeting users whose only computing device might be a phone, I expected a much more usable site on mobile.
- ilkke 3y agoThe tool itself is at https://downpour.games/ https://downpour.games/
- dhalucario 3y agoThank you, but I would love to read the article.
- dhalucario 3y agoThank god that Firefox has the reader mode.
- jmpavlec 3y agoMobile site looks terrible to view. Colors everywhere and quite some bits not fitting on the screen. Reminds me of geocities.
- leduyquang753 3y agoLooks like no effort was spent on responsiveness, which feels kind of ironic.
- mst 3y agoThe author commented elsethread that they're well aware their blog is due for some love but refused to get distracted by yak shaving that until they had downpour itself shipped. That seems pretty reasonable to me under the circumstances.
- jfengel 3y agoHacker News is full of people telling me how much they miss GeoCities. I have no idea why but I hope they find what they are looking for.
- kfarr 3y agoLOVE IT -- reminds me of old school mac hypercard concept.
- hanniabu 3y agoSeems like a huge stretch to call this a game. It's more like making an interactive storyboard.
- Wowfunhappy 3y agoPeek-a-boo is a game. Jump rope is a game. An interactive storyboard is definitely also a game.
- amatecha 3y agoever played Myst?
- IshKebab 3y agoI agree. Technically you can make very simple games with this, but it's not what the description implied to me.
- silenced_trope 3y agoNeat! I'm curious, and maybe a bit cynical, but do you handle explicit things? Since kids could be one of the largest audiences, I'm just always interested in hearing about whether people prepare for users creating explicit content given there's a home/explore feed of games.
- v21 3y agoHello, the creator here. It's a tricky subject, I agree - especially because as a trans person who likes lots of messy transgressive art, I don't want to shut down that kind of self-expression from the platform. But also it's on the app stores, which do have rules for what content can be served up within an app. But there's a few layers to this - first is that the Featured list is currently a hand selected list of users, which means that there's no algorithm to surface that kind of explicit content automatically. And there's also a reporting/moderation system for explicit content that is uploaded. And finally - the app works as a standalone tool even if you don't host the games on the platform - you can make explicit content and export it to host elsewhere. I'm always glad when people think about this side of stuff - honestly it's one of the things I've most been stressed about with launching this. You gotta!
- DicIfTEx 3y agoIt'd be cool to see a remake of Masq[0] in this. [0]: https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/have-you-played-masq https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/have-you-played-masq
- vampiresdoexist 3y agoMan what a quirky website! And the app is an equal vibe. A super fun concept. Will definitely tap around.
- karithik 3y agoHey
- Joel_Mckay 3y agoBrings back some nostalgic memories of HyperCard. Nicely done =)
- grodriguez100 3y agoNitpicking, but “the game creation tool I have been working on for the past few years” and “I started it […] in October 2022” don’t combine very well.
- MattRix 3y agoNitpicking, but I don’t really think that was worth a comment.
- retsibsi 3y agoI think it's fair enough? The discrepancy between a few years and 17 months is outside the realm of ordinary casual imprecision, so it seems like the author made a mistake one way or the other. I'm kind of curious now about how long it really took, and whether they just made a typo or the last year and a half felt like years to them.
- grodriguez100 3y agoWhat’s wrong with making a comment? It’s not like there’s a limited supply of them. If you don’t find a comment interesting you can just ignore it, no harm done.
- MattRix 3y agoBecause I had to read it and it wasted my time. I (and I imagine most users here) don’t always read every single comment, so the inane ones actually do reduce the number of good comments we get to see.
- grodriguez100 3y agoThank you for educating me. Obviously your insightful comments don’t waste anyone’s time.
- willwade 3y agoThis is great. I'd love to see some accessibility aspects added.. This would be MASSIVE for schools with children who are learning to use switches or eyegaze or other access methods and could be educational too. (see https://www.helpkidzlearn.com/cm-info https://www.helpkidzlearn.com/cm-info for what is kind of doing this but downpour gives way more flexibility). So: Switch scanning ability. Highlight each part in a linear way. Allow space to select that item. Enter could move the item on Im not sure if this would work but look at https://tools.openaac.org/ https://tools.openaac.org/ see https://tools.openaac.org/demo.html https://tools.openaac.org/demo.html and hit scan in top right for a demo I'd be happy to offer more support on this..
- v21 3y agoHi! Thank you. The exported games run as ordinary HTML pages, so hopefully they're hitting a minimum bar for this kind of accessibility already (tab will cycle through links, enter will work to select it). The actual output format is open source (https://github.com/downpourlimited/engine https://github.com/downpourlimited/engine) so making games within Downpour, exporting them, and then adding in the AAC shim or any other technology should be pretty straightforward. I'm not sure what adding more support for this tech by default would look like, but I'd be happy to chat more about it - email me at v@downpour.limited ?
- martindbp 3y agoAwesome! I've been wanting to make something like this that I can use with my son and nieces, but haven't had the time. This is exactly what I've been looking for. I expect we'll be spending all summer making little games together!
- p4bl0 3y agoThis is the kind of simple tools some people take way too seriously and make awesome and previously difficult to imagine things with by putting in an somewhat unhealthy but very enjoyable amount of effort to circumvent the limitations of the framework their using. I love it and I'm sure we'll see awesome games and artistic pieces and stories and such made with it!
- boo-ga-ga 3y agoGreat idea, love the style of the app and the website!
- bobse 3y ago[dead]
- msie 3y agoCouldn't run on Mac, runs on iPad only. Is this correct?
- gcanyon 3y agoI can't create an account or log in? I give it an email address, click the link in the email it sends, and I end up at the app store.
- koinedad 3y agoI’d like to read about Downpour but website is not very mobile friendly. Landscape is a little better
- alwaysbeconsing 3y agoLooks readable with Reader Mode for me.
- erickotato 3y agoThis reminds me of Hotglue: https://hotglue.me/ https://hotglue.me/ It's not a game making tool, of course, but you can still make an adventure game with it.
- dave333 3y agoFor seniors working with their grandchildren the default colors make the text very hard to read - grey text on medium mauve background - need much higher contrast. Mostly this applies to the text in the instruction boxes that can't be changed or resized. This is on an Android phone.