‘I did not expect so many games about people’s pets’: why Downpour is a great alternative to doomscrolling | Mobile games

Last week, while slowly suffocating on a packed train from Frome to London, I took out my phone and instead of doomscrolling social media, I made a game. It was an extremely basic game that required the player to correctly identify Westminster Palace’s Big Ben tower in a photograph, but the experience was so engrossing that the journey flew by.

The app I used to build my masterpiece was Downpour, by lone coder v Buckenham. Launched on App Store and Google Play last week, it’s an intuitive program that lets you build games out of your own photos. You simply create a collage of images, add some text and save that as a page; you then add more pages and link them together to create your game. Transparent boxes on the screen form the hyperlinks – so say you use a photograph of Westminster, you can place a box around the Elizabeth Tower and when the player touches it, they’ll be led to a page that says “Congratulations, you’ve found Big Ben”.

You then upload your game to the server, where other Downpour owners can find it. But you can also extract it as a URL so people can simply copy the URL into their browser address line and play it online, like visiting a website.

Already, there are plenty of amusing Downpour projects available to play. Lots of people are making games about their pets, challenging players to spot their beloved cats or dogs in photos. Some people are crafting reasonably complex adventure games. Buckenham came up with the idea when she was trying to make a game out of hand drawn illustrations. Making the images was enjoyable, but trying to wrangle with the technology to make them interactive was more frustrating. So she thought: we all carry these powerful and intuitive computers around in our pockets all day. Why not harness them to make simple games?

Buckenham has had an interesting, atypical career in game development so far. She worked at Niantic, the creator of augmented reality games such as Pokémon Go and Ingress, and before that at Sensible Object, the creator of the technologically enhanced board game, Beasts of Balance. But she’s also made interactive toys, including Cheap Bots, Done Quick!, a tool for making automated Twitter bot accounts such as @infinite_scream and @softlandscapes.

“I see games as one part of this larger landscape of … creative technology, interactive media, whatever you want to call it,” she says, citing adventure game creators Twine and Bitsy as her inspirations. “I’ve always been into technology where you poke it and it pokes you back – games are one part of that but creative tools are just as much in the mix. Or things which don’t cleanly sit in either category. I always love something that sits messily between two things.”

That word messy comes up quite a bit, and there is something delightfully chaotic about the Downpour games that have been made so far. Weird photos, weird fonts, strange ideas about what games are … it reminds me of the dawn of the internet as a mass phenomenon, when people were using platforms such as Angelfire and Geocities to make very simple, personal websites out of stock images, dodgy fonts and animated icons.

“Web 2.0 came along and tidied everything up,” says Buckenham, on the arrival of sites such as MySpace and Facebook. “It wasn’t so much because that’s what people were looking for, but out of a desire to seem professional and grown up in investor presentations. But people like making a mess! They try to make as much of a mess as possible in the little boxes that platforms like X and Instagram give them. So one thing Downpour does is let them make as big of a mess as they like. I want to let people fill the page with the stuff they want to make, connect those pages together in idiosyncratic ways.”

Downpour also cleverly exploits our habitual smartphone behaviours. We’re used to taking photos and using simple tools to edit and enhance them; we’re used to adding text; and any TikTok creators will be familiar with editing and uploading content. Buckenham says she wants to keep adding functionality, but also never wants to get away from its immediacy. Her wish is that Downpour becomes a jumping off point. “I really hope I see people get their start playing around with it, and then get more ambitious and learn more complicated tools to take those things further,” she says. “You can export your games from Downpour, add new functionality in by writing new Javascript code, host them elsewhere, do what you like with them – the best tools don’t do everything themselves, but exist within a larger ecosystem.”

For now, it’s fascinating to watch how people use Downpour, the ways it gives us little glimpses into their lives and homes. “I did not expect that quite so many of the early games would be about people’s pets,” says Buckenham. But as we’ve seen with creative digital tools and with games themselves over the past 50 years, it’s impossible to predict how they will be used – and that’s the pleasure of it, as Buckenham sees it.

“It’s just such a joy to see the things people have made, things that are sweet or personal or funny or beautiful, and know that they wouldn’t have existed if not for my work making a tool. That’s a powerful feeling.”