In the past, when the Lunar New Year rolled around, I would occasionally make a rude bingo card to ease the generational friction created by many disparate relatives suddenly spending too much time together. I did not share the bingo cards with all, but they were a silly little way to let off steam and commiserate with like-minded victims who endured hours-long reunion dinners and polite family visits with very difficult people. This year, I was armed with something far superior: I made a (fictional) game where you choose your own adventure in Downpour called Dragon me to hell that meant communicating with my grandmother's deceased dog, possibly committing a small crime, and escaping to our freedom.
Downpour is a new application that allows you join images on your phone to create simple interactive games without any programming or game design experience. It is the brainchild of V Buckenham, an indie gaming veteran known for creating the Cheap bots, made fast! tool that gave us almost a decade of incredibly creative art bots (until Twitter revoked API access at scale in 2023). And with the touch of a button, you can share that game online.
Right now, Downpour games are basic (photos only, no movies or GIFs) and delightfully quick to create. As with Cheap Bots, Buckenham is taking a “it costs more to build, but it costs less to run” approach. When it launches on March 6, Downpour will be free on iOS and Android with a small subscription tier of $4.99 per month for additional features. (The goal is for these subscriptions to fully fund the app.) “I want this to be something that people can use and that will last, and I feel like there's a better chance of that happening if it's just me,” they say. .
“I want this to be something that people can use and that will last.”
I decided that my second effort would be a tour of Lunar New Year delights, many of which are unique to Southeast Asia. During family visits, I spent time taking photos and putting together a mini gallery of reviews; This took about 30 minutes of dragging and dropping photos, writing banner ads, and linking pages through interactive boxes. (You might discover, for example, that the “prosperity box” on my food tour has a hidden clickable spot.) As a quasi-Luddite, this all seems like the closest I'll ever get to doing anything more complicated than a basic Instagram post. As the day progressed, I added more treats to my snack gallery; Even now, I'm full of ideas for more food-related experiments, perhaps ones that might offer a glimpse into my corner of the world.
Downpour is not just about creating and sharing a game, it also offers a new way to explore and interact with your own ideas. On the one hand, there is no algorithm to recommend games; So far, it seems like Downpour really shines as a work-in-progress place where creators can add new surprises on the fly or use it as an interactive journal to expand on existing ideas. “I make ceramics, so I often use it as a kind of notebook when I go in,” Buckenham explains. “I am expanding it over time, as if it were a selfie diary.” As a result, the “feed” or landing page is just the latest thing someone has posted, which really helps if you want to use Downpour as a reference tool.
However, the immediate urge to share my Lunar New Year game with others was powerful. It's easy to see that Downpour has the potential to become a formidable niche for a new form of spontaneous, interactive social media art that can be made in minutes. As such, Buckenham has had to add moderation duties to the project since they are doing everything solo. “You have to really think about it as a social network and try to prepare for that, so that if it takes off, it won't be completely inundated with terrible things right away,” they say.
A problem I had when making Dragon me to hell was that my searches for fair use dragon images turned up an overwhelming amount of anemic ai-generated art. The idea, of course, is that you use your own art and photos on Downpour, but that's a lot to ask of a one-click culture that relies on instant reaction images. I ask Buckenham if he worries about Downpour being overrun by ai art. “I feel a little conflicted about it,” they say, acknowledging that it's difficult to have productive conversations about generative art without attracting art bot jockeys who skillfully combine cues. “I don't know to what extent it will be a real problem, but I don't want to have any blanket prohibition against it,” they add. “There are people who really like doing that and I don't want to take that away from them, but at the same time I don't really like it either.”
“You have to think a lot about it as a social network and try to prepare for that”
In previous interviews, Buckenham has been inspired by flatgames, a genre of simple 2D games informed by DIY magazine culture. It's clear to see the commonalities between Downpour and Flatgames, although the latter also involves simple motion controls and a single sound track (usually field recordings or ambient noise). I ask Buckenham if they would like to introduce sound to Downpour in the future, to which they respond with a resounding yes, with the caveat that adding audio often comes with a whole new world of potential licensing issues. For now, however, the most interesting thing about Downpour is that you can create an interactive story without any special effort or training and share it with the press of a button.
Somehow, working on my two small projects evoked the same vibe that I get from slow movement of food – highly localized experiences that require a little more time and thought than the average social media post. It's that extra bit of interactivity, the simple act of choosing to click, that makes the difference. And for the first time in years, I feel like I want to make art again. “Some of the best feedback from beta testers is actually people saying, 'I downloaded it and played with this, and it's really exciting, and then I went and made a bunch of art, intending to put it in a Downpour game. , and it really revitalized my relationship with art,'” Buckenham says.
Downpour is also, quite consciously, a tool created with accessibility, accessibility, and versatility in mind. “It's important to me that you can download (your games),” says Buckenham, who wrote a tutorial on how to put Downpour games on Neocities websites; They plan to make a guide on how to put the games itch.io, also. Buckenham is also active on Cohost, where it is possible to use iframes (or in Cohost parlance, chiframes) to insert a Downpour game into an HTML post.
“I deliberately haven't added as many features to (Downpour), because if I can release it and it has this basic functionality… and it's easy to use… then people will be excited about the new features that I have. can they add,” they laugh. “Right now, I really want to release it so I can develop it again.”
