DOWNPOUR
What inspired the creation of Downpour, which invites you to turn photos into games?
One thing interactive entertainment has always been short on, when it comes to covering life’s essential subjects: games about tea. Correcting this imbalance might not have been V Buckenham’s intent in developing game-creation app Downpour, but it does seem to be infused within it. In January 2022, Buckenham began tweeting short games made using a tool she’d been tinkering with since leaving her role of lead game designer at Niantic (see ‘Passing Go’). The first of those games, posted on New Year’s Day, opens on a photograph of a kitchen counter holding a kettle, teabags and milk, which must be tapped in the correct order, lest you find yourself scolded.
In March, when Downpour launched in app stores, developer Terry Cavanagh tried his hand at the nascent teamaking genre, with just the kind of mechanical twist you’d expect from the creator of Super Hexagon and VVVVVV. Unlike Buckenham’s game, A Proper Cup Of Tea (at the risk of spoiling it, for those who haven’t played yet) rewards every possible combination of ingredients, in any order. A triple-teabag-and-milk brew, a cup that holds only sugar cubes, even a straightforward cuppa – these are all equally viable routes to an S-Rank.
“The joke works better because you’ve had to click to see the punchline,” says Buckenham. “It’s like telling a knock-knock joke, where you have to be involved to get the answer.” She’s not talking about
The result allows you to gather images and text into a kind of interactive slideshow
Cavanagh’s game here – or anything made with Downpour – but rather social network Mastodon. Specifically, the way its users began leveraging its contentwarning system, which obscures text until clicked, as a way of making jokes interactive. This is just one influence that fed into the creation of this app, along with paper-doll avatar maker Picrew, game-creation tools Bitsy and Twine, and the DIY ‘flatgame’ movement on Itch.io.
The result is an app that allows you to gather together images and text into a kind of interactive slideshow, where any part of the screen can be linked to another slide, the digital equivalent of moving between pages of an adventure game book. Once complete, this game can be uploaded to Downpour’s servers and shared, either within the app or – vitally – via a downpour.games link, making it playable from a browser. This makes games accessible to anyone who sees them on social media. “The plan was always that the way people find Downpour is someone makes a cool game and posts it,”
Buckenham says. “And once people see a couple of cool games, then they’re like, ‘Oh, I want to have a go with this’.”
As for what people are making with it, a quick browse of Downpour’s in-app library might uncover anything from il
