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.
Re:Downpour Is Out
by v21 on Saturday March 09, 2024 @06:12AM
(#39650962)
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.
Re:Downpour Is Out
by ilkke on Sunday March 10, 2024 @06:32AM
(#39658118)
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.
Re:Downpour Is Out
by araes on Saturday March 09, 2024 @01:11PM
(#39653598)
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]
Hate to be negative, but that web site is really hideous. Text columns are tiny (at least on mobile), the rainbow background is nausea inducing, and despite forcing myself to read it, I still really have no idea what downpour is or why I would want it.
I tried a couple of the games... And they are just really simple web pages that you click and they show the next page?
Re:Downpour Is Out
by v21 on Saturday March 09, 2024 @06:04AM
(#39650917)
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)
Re:Downpour Is Out
by jarboot on Friday March 08, 2024 @04:58PM
(#39647020)
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.
Re:Downpour Is Out
by v21 on Saturday March 09, 2024 @05:59AM
(#39650894)
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.
Re:Downpour Is Out
by geuis on Friday March 08, 2024 @06:35PM
(#39647837)
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?
Re:Downpour Is Out
by geuis on Friday March 08, 2024 @07:05PM
(#39648045)
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.)
Re:Downpour Is Out
by Liquix on Friday March 08, 2024 @06:08PM
(#39647634)
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.
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.
Re:Downpour Is Out
by v21 on Saturday March 09, 2024 @06:22AM
(#39651000)
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"
Re:Downpour Is Out
by mst on Saturday March 09, 2024 @08:53AM
(#39651563)
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.
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.
Re:Downpour Is Out
by v21 on Saturday March 09, 2024 @06:11AM
(#39650955)
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!
Re:Downpour Is Out
by retsibsi on Saturday March 09, 2024 @03:39AM
(#39650370)
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.
Re:Downpour Is Out
by MattRix on Monday March 11, 2024 @09:59AM
(#39668331)
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.
Re:Downpour Is Out
by willwade on Saturday March 09, 2024 @01:20AM
(#39649807)
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
Re:Downpour Is Out
by v21 on Saturday March 09, 2024 @06:41AM
(#39651077)
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 [email protected] ?
Re:Downpour Is Out
by martindbp on Saturday March 09, 2024 @01:52AM
(#39649966)
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!
Re:Downpour Is Out
by p4bl0 on Saturday March 09, 2024 @03:34AM
(#39650351)
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!
Re:Downpour Is Out
by dave333 on Thursday March 14, 2024 @10:34AM
(#39704554)
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.
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!
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?
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...
I tried a couple of the games... And they are just really simple web pages that you click and they show the next page?
Sorry, really don't get it.
How do I get my work out of my phone? How do I distribute it?
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.
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?
Not sure where the .fm came from. Perhaps OP was also thinking of libro.fm, another excellent drm free audiobook store.
https://www.downpour.com/the-corporation-wars-insurgence?sp=...
Libro.fm is great too. I own 14 books there (the number is lower because they haven't been around as long).
neat project!
But the tool seems like a cool idea.
But the way to go these days is WebP, which gets the image down to 319KB, with compression set to 55.
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"
That seems pretty reasonable to me under the circumstances.
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.
[0]: https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/have-you-played-masq
A super fun concept. Will definitely tap around.
Nicely done =)
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..
I give it an email address, click the link in the email it sends, and I end up at the app store.
https://hotglue.me/
It's not a game making tool, of course, but you can still make an adventure game with it.