Downpour is the game creation tool I have been working on for the past few years | Hacker News Reader

Downpour is the game creation tool I have been working on for the past few years

v21.io

391 pointssurprisetalk74 comments

I just downloaded the app and thoroughly enjoyed playing the first random game I tried - “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!

> 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?

This is HyperCard! And it was surprisingly more difficult than I thought it would be.

This is really cute :) thanks for sharing

maedeline hiding behind the bookshelf is so fucking adorable

That was fun and honestly I didn’t know cats could be that cute. My cat growing up was very mean :(

Exciting! 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/ 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.

Getting strong HyperCard vibes off this, which is a beautiful thing

Having 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

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypermedia

[3] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/05/25-years-of-hypercar...

[4] http://www.scottmccloud.com/1-webcomics/icst/icst-4/icst-4.h...

go check out https://castle.xyz/! it's very inspired by hypercard

May I add Decker https://internet-janitor.itch.io/decker

As 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.

Great 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.

This 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 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/ see 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..

Hi! 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) 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 ?

Neat!

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.

Hello, 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!

It'd be cool to see a remake of Masq[0] in this.

[0]: https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/have-you-played-masq

I 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.

Creator 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.

This 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!

Seems like a huge stretch to call this a game. It's more like making an interactive storyboard.

Peek-a-boo is a game. Jump rope is a game. An interactive storyboard is definitely also a game.

I agree. Technically you can make very simple games with this, but it's not what the description implied to me.

ever played Myst?

Man what a quirky website! And the app is an equal vibe.

A super fun concept. Will definitely tap around.

Hey

I’ve seen one or two other cats on the internet, but Madeleine is now my favourite

Awesome! 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!

For 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.

Tools like this are incredible. Thanks for sharing.

Hmm... okay, it only works on mobiles. Hypercard vibes good.

How do I get my work out of my phone? How do I distribute it?

Either 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)

This reminds me of Hotglue:

https://hotglue.me/

It's not a game making tool, of course, but you can still make an adventure game with it.

I 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.

Brings back some nostalgic memories of HyperCard.

Nicely done =)

I’d like to read about Downpour but website is not very mobile friendly. Landscape is a little better

Looks readable with Reader Mode for me.

This is great! Reminds me of Flash point and click games circa 2000.

Couldn't run on Mac, runs on iPad only. Is this correct?

LOVE IT -- reminds me of old school mac hypercard concept.

Great idea, love the style of the app and the website!

let's create Myst in this

Name is maybe a little similar to downpour.fm, a good drm free audiobook site

Thanks 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?

Pretty sure OP means 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.

Thanks 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=...

That'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).

a 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!

On 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.

Same comment here. However the psychedelic background nature and that it loads slow is a distraction

hello, 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"

I backed out of reading it because the mobile experience is so bad. Causes h-scroll and the content is this super narrow div.

Agree, I couldn't really read it. It seems like probably a cool project though.

Even 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.

Sidenote, 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.

You are not alone and in firefox ctrl+alt+r (aka reader mode) it helps

Better don't try it on mobile then ;)

its not just you. Yikes.

This site is unusable on mobile.

For something ostensibly targeting users whose only computing device might be a phone, I expected a much more usable site on mobile.

The tool itself is at https://downpour.games/

Thank you, but I would love to read the article.

Thank god that Firefox has the reader mode.

Mobile site looks terrible to view. Colors everywhere and quite some bits not fitting on the screen. Reminds me of geocities.

Looks like no effort was spent on responsiveness, which feels kind of ironic.

The 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.

Hacker 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.

Nitpicking, 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.

Nitpicking, but I don’t really think that was worth a comment.

I 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.

What’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.

Because 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.

Thank you for educating me. Obviously your insightful comments don’t waste anyone’s time.

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