When it comes to casual games online, they tend to be built in Adobe’s Flash (see Kongregate). But Microsoft wants people to start creating Web video games in its competing Silverlight.
Today, it is taking a step to make that easier by introducing the Popfly Game Creator. Microsoft launched Popfly last year as an easy way to create widgets and mashups using Silverlight. With Popfly Game Creator, it is adding a simple Web-based authoring environment for creating casual arcade-style games.
The tool is built for non-programmers so that anyone can create a game, and is particularly aimed at kids and teenagers. It is entirely browser-based. You create a game using predefined templates that can be modified, and when you are satisfied, you hit play to run the code. The games run in Silverlight and will be hosted at Popfly, but are embeddable anywhere on the Web. Here’s a game Microsoft created for us with Michael as the main character.
The Game Creator starts off with templates for about 20 different types of games—from space invaders and breakout to racing games and shooters. Game makers can populate their games with hundreds of characters, background scenes, sound effects and objects, or create their own from scratch. More details can be found on the Popfly wiki.
Nice and much easier with Popfly.. good stuff.
Great stuff Microsoft, Just when casual gaming is growing, you come up with Popfly. Pretty neat.
@Azhar (#2): Popfly actually launched just about a year ago just before last year’s Maker Faire with a set of mashup creation tools.
Aaron
(Former Microsoftie, and a former member of the Popfly team)
You should see Newgrounds.com for example of Flash Content. They’ve been around much longer than Kongregate and are the official ‘YouTube’ for games.
Can we use these games on our website?
This article is quite inaccurate. Silverlight support has only recently been added so “Microsoft launched Popfly last year as an easy way to create widgets and mashups using Silverlight.” is completely off the mark.
So exporting to silverlight format is now new to popfly?
Silverlight support was added to Popfly in mid-February.
@ 6: This article is completely accurate.
PopFly was created for the express purpose of promoting Silverlight, which has been around publicly for at least 2 years now. Popfly *launched* with Silverlight support.
The game creator is the new addition.
God that snapshot thing is such trash. Thankfully it can be disabled.
Oh great, another attempt at removing the use of a coder in the scene. Good one microsoft!
Douchbags. It doesn’t work in Linux, but Flash does.
Erick, how much has M$ paid for this coverage?
I remember installing game creating kits (running on windows 3.1) from floppy disks included in software magazines back in the mid-90’s and it looked like the screenshots you posted. Seriously.
Here’s to a new generation of kids getting to learn coding through making fun games.
http://mygamebuilder.com is in a similar vein, but more RPG oriented, and typically people are working on teams on making games… also, there’s more focus on user-generated pixelart
@Dennis and Vengence, so what if it looks basic and replaces the coder? That’s the whole point! Everyone nows they have more advanceed tools for more experienceed users.
That was a lot of fun seeing Michael killed over and over again by Pinky, Blinky, Inky, and Clyde rejects.
The first comments on this sound a lot like MS shills.
I wonder how much $ MS is funneling into this terrible idea. Maybe they can make the jump to conclusions mat work in Silverlight too (firefox not supported of course).
A Jump to Conclusions Mat is not a bad idea, but I believe that we’re currently devoting a lot of $ to the next version of the TPS Reporting tools first.
Seriously though, Silverlight supports Firefox on Windows, and OS X, and Linux support (not sure for which distros) is under joint development with the Mono team…