Chúng tôi đã nói chuyện với V Buckenham, người đã giải thích cho chúng tôi cách Downpour có thể tạo ra trò chơi ngay cả khi bạn thậm chí chưa bao giờ nghĩ đến việc tạo ra một trò chơi trước đây.
"We're in Bilbao for the BIG 2024 and I'm here joined by V who just shared a Downpour of ideas Creative ideas for young developers here gathered here in Bilbao. Thank you so much for joining us. You made Downpour which is a way, a platform, a tool for Developers and just people with interesting ideas to make games and put them together With your tool. So what can you tell us about the like the main Concept and how it works? Sure thing. Yeah, so I mean, I guess guess the main point of it is That you don't have to be a developer to make a game You don't have to have any particular like a skill set to do it. You can just Make something so it kind of joins this tradition of tools like Twine and Bitsy in yeah, you can download it. You can start messing around It's a it's an app for iPhone and Android so you can download it and you can start making stuff you can collage together images and text and Link link different pages together in that kind of collage and you can make a game so you can download it make a game Whilst I was giving my talk somebody Downloaded Downpour and made a little game Riffing off Downpour and a thing that I said in my talk and had that published and online by the time I'd finished giving my Talk which I saw when I went and checked on the back end afterwards And that was that was so exciting to see because that's really what downfalls all about It's the oh, I've got a stupid joke and I can make a stupid joke a stupid like a little interactive joke And I can have that online Without like because you wouldn't do that. Otherwise you wouldn't go like I call Let me just fire up a new Unity projects just to make this tiny little joke and put it online, right?
But you can do that with Downpour. New challenge unlocked: every talk you you give from now on that has to happen all over again So, how does it work under the hood? What's what's going on there? What sort of you know?
Systems are working for these to happen. Sure. Yeah, so I mean the thing itself is an app It's actually built in flutter, which is some framework that lets you do kind of cross-platform apps And it yeah lets you arrange stuff on a little little canvas on a little Yeah, little thing there make pages has the UI all of that kind of stuff Then it uploads to the server so the server runs there it can also be played on the web So the like save format also works on the web there Yeah, I guess that's that's pretty much it like it lets you make a little thing and it uploads the save data It works in the app and on online and like on the web yeah, yeah like it's you know a kind of thing where it's like the the concept is simple enough and then actually making it usable and making it something that like is approachable and Doing all of the details is then the thing that's actually the trick was the craziest thing you've seen done with Downpour perhaps the silliest simplest or the more complex or something that you would Would have never thought it was possible to run with your with your system I'm gonna give myself two answers. So like one that's just like a really nice game is my friend Terry Cavanagh Yeah, who's made VVVV and I see dungeons and all VVVV is one of my all-time favorites Yeah, so he he made a recent game using Downpour and it's it's it's the how to make a cup of tea you know, it's the like because you know the English are very specific about how how tea ought to be made, right?
and Him being Irish and not being you know that much of a tea drinker is like this is ridiculous Any way of making tea is correct. So gives you the like, okay, you need to make the cup of tea You need to do it correctly and then any combination of cold water Water before the tea bag milk in beforehand just an empty mug Just a big thing of milk any of these is a valid way to make some tea and just carry that off permanently like perfectly Also a little behind-the-scenes fact is like because this was such a big and complicated thing he was working on it over the course of three days and For continuity purposes. He therefore didn't change his t-shirt for three days So after he finishes My friend Holly was like, I think you should really change your change your t-shirt now He's like, yeah. No, I think it's time so yeah, but that's a great game and then one an example that I talked about in my talk earlier is a game by my friend Mike cook who made tic-tac-toe within it, which is his first Downpour game and Because Downpour it's kind of limited deliberately limited in what you can do Like and if you think about there's a bunch of options for different things you can do within Tic-tac-toe noughts and crosses right lots of different places. You can put stuff He made that by procedurally generating all of the possible tic-tac-toe boards Which of there's five thousand five hundred about that?
Generating that and then generating the code for it in order to create a Downpour game that would fit within that And then yeah, because the format is something you can you can manage so that's like something. I'm just like, oh, yeah Did not necessarily let's try and break it. Does it break? Can you can you break it?
Like it run out of memory or sort of try to loop it in a way that it breaks or yeah yeah, yeah, you could break it if you like if you put too many pages in or you do something then it'll like You know stop the app will stop working like this, you know It doesn't doesn't work infinitely but like, you know It holds up to most things like I played through that tic-tac-toe game on stage there like yeah So like that works fine and it works reliably But like, you know And this is the thing I talked about in my talk is just like trying to make tools such that People can do stuff that you didn't expect for that, right?
People can take it in places you wouldn't you wouldn't see so for example, it can be useful for prototyping as well and conceptualizing Ideas for you know for indie developers or just regular people that really want to try out stuff But you know like a first step into a project. Do you think that purpose is is also serves that purpose as well?
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I hope so I like it's I think it's useful for that kind of like, ah, can I just lay out a screen?
Can I just mock something up quickly?
I mean it was so like, you know It is useful as a prototyping tool and like definitely feel free like people should go and feel free to use it But like also it's it's as much just designed for like can you just riff off and can you make something?
Immediately rather than necessarily it's a step towards a more complicated thing, right?
You felt like something like this was necessary How do you how do you start thinking about this concept and then and then ended up developing it?
So actually it kind of came out of my work doing kind of games curation. So I was Working on now play this this Games Festival in London Still involved in and I think that we really like to do is we really like to have people people be able to come to the festival and people be able to Make games whilst they're there right? Like that's a great thing Like you come to like, you know an event like this and you can play games But it's really great to be able to come and go like oh, yeah, I made something today, right?
So like that's the thing we like to do and we had a thing there's this idea of flat games where you like get some assets and you put them together and it's like Focused on the kind of narrative of it versus kind of about like complicated mechanics And most of these flat games are made inside Unity so it's like hand-drawn assets and then if you try making it the thing you get is like it's very very nice to draw things on paper and be kind of creative in that kind of way and If you know Unity It's pretty good to just like arrange that stuff and like build a little world out of these assets and then there's a step in between which is awful where you have to like scan things and then cut them out in Photoshop and import them and then change the Import settings in order to get them in right like and you know, like I'm used to this I'm a professional game game designer. Like I I have done this step. I am capable of doing this I'm capable of doing the like programming stuff and putting logic on stuff. Like, you know, that's fine, but It's such a barrier if you want to mess around if you want to have this kind of like low Low stakes kind of thing and it also is unnecessary That's the thing that gets to me right like you could just have a phone right a phone has a camera on it You can take the picture you can Yeah, draw things you can cut stuff out and you can arrange stuff in a canvas All of this stuff can be can be done on a phone. So Why shouldn't it why shouldn't there be something that would let people make stuff that way mess around is a nice Definition you should be able to mess around right? So, how do you think you know developers?
Have more opportunities now to mess around and to create ideas and to prototype For example also in terms of engines you mentioned Unity, before we were talking about Godot There there are more tools now So, how do you think you know developers are coming back to you saying hey, this is useful and now we can use this this And that how do you think the environment is now for them to?
experiment, I Think it's good. Yeah, like yeah, I mean also like I guess I kind of distinguish between the kind of Professional tools and creative tools, right?
there's this like class of stuff where it's like Godot or Unity where it's like we're trying to Make professional grade tools and if it's your job, then you can make incredibly sophisticated things You can go really deep here and you know That stuff's very very necessary, right?
Like somebody also makes games on this kind of level like you want good tools You want to be able to work in this and innovation there and being able to expand stuff and making those workflows Good is important. But then there's also the like Things which are deliberately constrained and you can't make everything win But you can make certain specific things faster and like it's amazing how that can lead to this big flowering of creativity like I'm so deeply inspired by Twine and like the the wave of creators that started making games because of Twine and the kind of Like lightweight stories often by queer people often by people who don't have huge resources that they could make within this and this whole wave of people who are making this really exciting stuff and That stuff then came out and influenced what the industry was talking about and the kind of what the larger games were and some of those People ended up getting more commercial work But also it's not defined by whether they got commercial work because that's where culture comes from right like and it comes from People making stuff who wouldn't have otherwise made stuff and you know, like Downpour is my attempt to go Oh, maybe I can maybe I can make some of this stuff happen Other than Downpour. Let me ask you about your previous work. You worked on a similar thing for Twitter Formerly Twitter so for Twitter and also on Mutazione We've been talking about Die Gute Fabrik in the past and Saltsea Chronicles and Mutazione Tell me about those previous projects, please. Sure. Yeah. Well Cheap Bots Done Quick was I guess kind of yeah, like Possible on X anymore. No, no, no Elon [Musk] got rid of all of the nice bots and only terrible bots are left there But yeah, so it was my attempts basically I knew a lot of people in love there was like this whole creative scene of people making you like Creative Twitter bots and like ripping off stuff and that was a scene as well and it was very exciting but again it was like constrained only to people who could program and who could Run a little server that could make stuff run and like again, it was like this isn't necessary And like the people who are gonna make the best stuff are not necessarily the people who are programmers, right?
You know people can be great programmers and great writers But like it's unreasonably realistic to expect those two things to occur at the same time. So it's like well why?
It doesn't need to be this complicated it could be that a single website is serving up lots of bots It could be that there was a friendly interface for it It could be that the whole whole process of like dealing with authentication and stuff like that was smoothed out So yeah, like it was like cool. Can I make this and I did and yeah, it's Continued on for what like seven years and 50,000 bots something like that And yeah, like and I made the source for that open source and now that there are successor ones for Mastodon and for Bluesky, so there's people still making stuff like Cheap Bots Done Quick on these other platforms Which it feels really great to me, right? And then about Mutazione How do you remember that project and what can you tell me about that? Sure. Yeah Well, I was on that project like good many years ago I would say the Mutazione was in development for like 10 years So yeah like it's kind of this weird thing of like being on that project and then I ended up leaving to go to go work on other stuff and like it was funny to play the the final thing and then like some small bits like like a bunch of like the navigation code right like the characters walking and some of the like visual effects and stuff like that are still in there and then a bunch of like I built This whole complicated narrative system that very sensibly they tore out and put something simpler in there So yeah, it's kind of weird to be on this thing. But like also Yeah, I love I love the game. I love all the people on that team and I'm it's so great to see yeah, then come out with Saltsea especially because Weirdly, I worked on the game for a few years and I feel like my most impactful Action I did on that project was after I'd left Where they were like, oh, hey, we're talking to this Hannah person like maybe to bring on as a writer And I was like, yeah no, Hannah's great and then Hannah [Nicklin] ended up joining was the writer on that and then ended up being the creative director on Saltsea and kind of leading on that and I'm like, oh great I'm good to see that my main impact on this is actually just recommending somebody who turns out to be really great What else are you working on now Why else can we expect from you in the near future is is it something that you are prototyping with Downpour at the same Time that would be a nice loop, right?
Yeah, well, so I'm working on various bits generally kind of freelance and like too early to talk about but The thing I can say is that I'm still working on Downpour like it's it's come out but there's still a ton of features that I want to add to it like Stuff my head like adding in video stuff adding in better kind of social features within that adding in the kind of like inventory logic system into that and Kind of extending that still trying to be really careful not to like ruin it being simple and approachable But like there's all of this Stuff that I wanted to add and like I feel like I continue working on it for many years Would you like to try it out with AI with some AI features or not? I?
Have I Don't know that I am a big fan of AI like I feel like as As the as the person who runs Downpour like my position from that is like you can use AI stuff in it But I don't feel like it's something that I really want to like put in generative AI into that It feels like it's like taking a position and like ultimately it's a tool for Artists and fellow straighters and like to enable them to make games So putting a thing in feels like it's just kind of insulting in a kind of way but I will say that there is an AI feature where I want to put in which is You should be able to click on an image and have it automatically remove its background. Which is not generative Yeah, which is not generative. It uses some of the same technology, but that's the thing I really want to do and there's like annoying platform Transcribing text it's not generative. Yeah, you're generating it exactly Yeah, so that's a that's that's actually an AI feature that I do really want to put in but other than that And Downpour is available for free on iOS and Android yep available for free on iOS and Android There's a subscription in there That's optional mainly if you just want to support me for adding new things into that or linking to external sites and stuff like that But yeah, you can download it for free. You can make stuff Please please join us on there Thank you so much for your time V enjoy the rest of the show and yeah. Have a great show You"