Happy Mother's Day! (Games for Mom)

Ben Anderson — Mon, 12 May 2008 01:56:03 GMT

Look Mom, I made you something:

Happy Mother's Day!

For those of you who are not my mom, the above game is my take on Plato's Allegory of the Cave (my Mom is a Philosophy and Religious Studies professor at the University of Idaho). I made the game using Popfly Game Creator, the product I work on for the Non-Pro Developer Tools team at Microsoft. You can use the tool to make 2D web games without writing any code. If you don't believe me, check out what my very non-programmer girlfriend came up for her mom (who teaches Spanish to elementary age children). A matching game for learning the colors:

And another game to learn the animals:

It's great to be able to do something creative for Mother's Day again. Love you Mom!

(For those of you interested in how these games were made, just click the tweak button and you can see them in Popfly for yourself! Next week I'll post some tips and tricks on the special effects I did in the Allegory of the Cave so that others can incorporate them into their own games).

One week of Popfly Game Creator

Ben Anderson — Sat, 10 May 2008 00:31:00 GMT

It’s now been one week since we first released Popfly Game Creator to the public at Maker Faire and on the web on May 2nd. I thought I’d take today to point out some of the cool games that people have made.

User zbuff001 made this challenging set of minigames:

while Adam made a pseudo-rhythm game “Type Type Revolution:

Raden managed to make “Badly Built Wall” very difficult: http://www.popfly.com/users/Raden/HARD%20GAME

Moo777 had a great game – Bellyjish Adventure with multiple stages: http://www.popfly.com/users/moo777/The%20Bellyjish%20Adventure

Here’s an interesting one a bit along the lines of the old "Scorched Earth" type games that someone came up with at Maker Faire:

One of the great things about building PGC on the Popfly platform is the collaboration it provides. Since the games are Popfly projects, users can share their games with others, which lets everyone learn from and tweak them. It’s cool to see a variety of games coming both that make interesting tweaks on existing games and samples, and those that folks come up with all on their own. It’ll be exciting to see what folks come up with after they’ve had more time with the creator.

I’m sure there are plenty of great games that I missed. If you have something you’d like to share, feel free to link it in the comments!

5/10/08 Update: Bellyjish Adventure is back up, removed the embedded "Badly Built Wall" update since the sounds were annoying :).

5/10/08 Update: Also removed the embedded Bellyjish Adventure since its sounds also were annoying :). Both are linked instead.

The Right Moves : game

Happy Mother's Day! (Games for Mom)

One week of Popfly Game Creator