Downpour: A game making tool for phones | Hacker News Reader

Downpour: A game making tool for phones

v21.io

161 pointshomarp39 comments

1) you take photo

2) you create 'clickable' zone(s) on the photo

3) you link the "zone" to another photo

sample games: https://twitter.com/v21/status/1477220587080724480

Back in the late 90s/early 2000s I worked at a game studio. One of the things we got in to were DVD games - we built a tool that was used to create quizzes on DVD players. Feels pretty similar to this - lots of fun.

This sounds the same as the 'Prototyping on Paper' app from years ago: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/pop-prototyping-on-paper/id555...

I’ve started making a more modern twist on this where you draw the prototype directly on your iPad rather than needing to take photos. Also let’s you make the prototype interactive with text fields, camera components and logic. Might be of interest - https://roughups.com

I really like this. As a kid I would make "flatgames" that were just Word docs that linked to each other, which in some sense inspired me to learn to code to make "real" games.

Same, but with PowerPoint! It's amazing how versatile the Microsoft Office suite is for purposes other than productivity...

Same here! I had a basic game where an enemy moved across the screen towards the character and you had to shoot it. Clicking the enemy would hyperlink to a slide where you shoot the enemy, the enemies animation finishing (when it touches the character) would link to a slide where you died. Working out how to do conditional logic in PowerPoint at 11 opened up a lot of exciting ideas for PowerPoint games for me. Though it lead to a lot of slides…

I feel obligated to note here that PowerPoint is Turing complete. It's pretty radical.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uNjxe8ShM-8

I built Tictactoe in Excel by creating every possible board state and then hyperlinking between them. I fixed the window size to 3x3 so the window would scroll to each state. Later learned AppleScript to automate parts of this process and eventually got in to HTML.

I did this but with folders! Then I learned about HTML maps (which seem very similar to Downpour) from Neopets, which is where things get real cool.

Neopets has a lot to answer for in our generation :P

I was lucky to get extra projects at school which were self directed flat games using PowerPoint, and a few other tools on the school computers. definitely some of my favourite projects as a young kid

This is cool. I can definitely imagine my kids having a lot of fun with something like this which wins me over immediately.

However, it also got me thinking about how resistant I've been to digital note taking, simply because I like the physicality of writing and notes on paper. Yet they get super disorganized, lost, whatever. The idea seen here could work as an interesting way to digitize and "link" together paper notes too, perhaps!

You might like the Rocket Book notebooks. You write with a pen on paper, but then you use the app to scan your notes to email or cloud storage, and then you use a wet cloth to wipe the pages clean. You get digitized notes like an expensive note tablet, but also the feel and replaceability of a plain old notebook.

(Despite making variants of this comment multiple times, I have no affiliation with them beyond happy customer.)

That's the sort of response I was hoping for - interesting lead, I'll check it out! :)

(At first glance, I think one aspect of the OP post that I'd still be missing is the ability to link different parts of notes together with other historical notes, perhaps. That "image map" type feature in the OP link is very compelling.)

Adding the extra step of taking a picture loses a lot of the productivity gain.

I think the remarkable tablet is the right balance in 2022. It automatically pushes notes into the cloud.

Did remarkable ever add the MAC address information to their control panel? Or do you still have to collect it from your DHCP server logs?

Not added, still collected:

https://support.remarkable.com/hc/en-us/articles/36000267477...

"Currently, there is no way to display the MAC address on the device. A temporary workaround is to connect to a router you have admin access to and copy the MAC address from the list of connected devices."

Booooo. Bad form!

>Adding the extra step of taking a picture loses a lot of the productivity gain.

Does it really? I feel like I spend many minutes filling out the page, and a few seconds taking a picture of it.

And I still have the paper.. I do not need to take a picture of it right away. I scan my notes with my phone in one batch setting.

Remarkable seems very expensive to save me from a 5 minute scanning session after a few hours of writing notes. On top of that it's another thing i have to carry and charge and possibly troubleshoot.

honestly, it is kind of silly to me that remarkable tries to sell itself as a place to take notes. It's main selling point to me is that it is a kindle I can take notes on. but I dont read enough to warrant purchasing an ereader

If you are diligent about scanning your notes at regular intervals, then I think you are fortunate to have that capacity. I have every intention of taking a photo of my notes but have not done so.

What is your process/ritual?

end of the day? end of the week?

do you set a trigger or reminder?

Do you review them while scanning?

I do them in bulk, when i have bits of downtime here and there like waiting for water to boil. I use my phone to scan, and then move the photos

I try to be up to date by the end of each month because i also scan receipts and like having them for reference when looking over my spend for month. That said Ive still got some march notes to scan in. I dont review them at all in relation to scanning them. I am making a digital archive of things Ive written down for any reason. If it is not worth archiving then i can delete it later, which i often do.

What helped me most with becoming consistent with it was a few key things listed below - and the overall process can be picked up and put down whenever i feel like it without causing chaos

1) Respect the page. when taking the note, I do not assume context will exist for it later. If a stranger were to get a photo dump of all my notes, they have a reasonable chance of organizing them appropriately. Missing context is written on the page first before putting it away, like date, page number, header keywords

2) I scan everything with my phone

3) I move scans from my phone to a single 'destination' folder on my computer / cloud and delete from my phone.

4) Within the destination folder, I subfolder for items of multiple pages. Not categories or dates or anything fancy. Just a very simple grouping of page x of y situations. No thinking involved. Similar to a stapler

5) I move things out of that scan dump folder into my regular digital file organization as needed, if needed. Personally, I have a "Handwritten Notes" folder - and within that folder I have an "Unfiled" folder which is my scan dump location for #3. After Im done with step 3 I move everything up a level out of the "unfiled" folder

In general, most of my digital file organization is with shortcuts anyway, so at this point im done with the scanning process. I find getting things scanned is meaningful by itself, and i dont see the need to comingle my handwritten notes with my digital notes. shortcuts used whenever i want both types of things in the same folder

My first thought reading the headline was, "But how do you author on a device where user input is such a chore?" Using the camera as the primary way to create content is brilliant. I love it.

This looks lovely! One nice addition would be the ability to record sounds and link them. This feature in ScratchJr [1] allows children to make animations with cute voices.

[1]: https://www.scratchjr.org/

I followed the link to the flatgame game jam and tried a few of the submissions. I really like the aesthetic. There's something comforting about its non-digital art.

It's always nice to see creative projects like these, so thanks to whoever posted it.

I remember reading about the "Hot-Spot Mode" on the Game Boy Camera, and I wanted to imitate it using the digital camera and the PC I had. I discovered HTML Image Maps, and while it did work, making them was such a hassle that I never got past making a few pages. Great to see there's a proper tool for it now, that I could've figured out how to use had it been available back then.

That is such a clever input method.

I also love that the example games work in a browser, because the ease of sharing stuff like this is a big part of it -- it's not just that if you're a kid you can bang out something interactive with a stack of papers and some pencils, it's a big thing if also once you're done you can just text someone a link or paste it into a group chat.

Hosting games is still kind of an annoyingly unsolved problem, but it's at least a lot easier to do with web games. It would be really cool to set a bunch of kids up with Itch accounts and have some kind of API integration with this tool where they could just start sharing web games back and forth, where the program just auto-uploads new builds over the API whenever they hit a publish button.

This just looks really delightful, I'm excited to see where it goes.

My 9yo was absolutely thrilled to find an app on iOS with a similar concept to this - I believe it's https://www.draw-your-game.com/. He's thoroughly familiar with ScratchJr so he's already making games there, but I don't think he's quite ready for me to stick him in front of Unity just yet.

Good on the dev for doing something in this space, it'll be appreciated.

This reminds me of Floors [0], an app where you could scan hand-drawn platforming levels on graph paper. I was only 12 or so, but I had so much fun with that thing. Unfortunately it seems the app has been discontinued as of 2016.

[0] http://www.projectpixelpress.com/floors

Sounds and looks nice!

Are you planning an Android version as well?

(Asking because it only mentions iOS on downpour.games which is linked in the provided post)

Very cool. I get the vibe of those old HyperCard games (Myst, The Manhole, Inigo Gets Out). HyperCard was simple enough anyone could hack a game together, lowering the bar for creators. I bet something great comes from this. Kudos!

Very cool! I would have loved this as a 12 year old. I used to play with Hypercard in a similar kind of way as flatgames.

That looks absolutely awesome.

How come this person's blog isn't responsive / mobile-friendly? I'm sure that they're capable so I think it might be a choice, but would be interested to hear why.

Huh! I didn't even notice that it isn't until I saw your comment.

Looking back at it again it feels quite comfortable to zoom in and read/scroll. But maybe that is just my phone being the right size (it's an S9).

I'd say the page is mobile friendly in a sense, even though it's not responsive.

Responsiveness is one of the more modern (as in wasn't a thing 10 years ago) somewhat advanced parts of webdev and just not in everyone's portfolio of skills. There is a skill level where it's possible to handcode a perfectly functional website, but miss most of the modern best practices.

Save you a click:

> It is a game making tool for phones

That description isn’t enough to describe what the author is making. The context of what flatgames are is needed.

There's already an audiobook app with the same name. Google before writing code.

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