14 DAY TRIAL // On June 12, 2008, Microsoft introduced its 20th major update to Popfly since it's launched the service, and for the first time ever, the Popfly Game Creator also evolved. Popfly Game Creator is the brainchild of Adam Nathan, the Microsoft Software Design Engineer who also authored the prototype that eventually grew to become Popfly. Designed as nothing more than a collection of visual tools set up to permit the creation of mashups, gadgets, Web pages and applications, Popfly also extended to games at the beginning of May.
Nathan debuted work on the Game Creator at the end of 2007 with a small team of four people and managed to deliver the product in May. Based on Silverlight, compatible with both version 1.0 and 2.0 Beta, the service is designed to enable non-coders to create games. Additionally, the Popfly social network permits authors to share, host, rate, comment and remix content.
"We released our 20th major update to Popfly, which includes our first update to the game creator since it was released just over a month ago. There are tons of new features for you game creators out there", Nathan explained, focusing on some of the features.
With the implementation of the update, game builders now have the possibility to customize the appearance of actors via the new color swapper. Actors can also be renamed, a feature missing in the initial Alpha version of the Popfly Game Creator, which now also enables users to put together customized characters.
"Actor stamping makes adding multiple actors fast and easy. 4 new events make it easy to create more powerful games (Scene Enter, Viewport Enter, Viewport Leave, and State Change). You can now filter any Scene Enter/Leave or Viewport Enter/Leave event by one or more directions. Creating multi-level games is easier, because you can now clone an existing scene. Searching & browsing of actors has been enhanced. The behaviors list is now a bit more helpful, since it shows exactly what key has been chosen for a keyboard event. You can now turn a Popfly game or mashup into your own first-class Facebook application and you can now see how many views your game or mashup has received", Nathan added.