Just in time for the Penny Arcade Expo, Microsoft revealed that Popfly Game Creator has evolved to Beta stage. The Popfly team will indeed participate at PAX 2008 in Seattle, and the Game Creator will be on location at the convention. The Beta Build of Popfly Game Creator brings to the table a range of improvements and new features addressing not only end users, but also game creators, advanced programmers and even mashup authors.

 

The Popfly Game Creator is, of course, the latest addition to the Microsoft Popfly project, which was initially focused only on making the creation of webpages and mashups without writing code a reality. The Redmond company's effort subsequently expanded into gaming, and with the Beta, the Popfly Game Creator gets increasingly sophisticated, while at the same time continuing to not require users to know code in order to get their "hands dirty" in the game building process.

 

Popfly Game Creator Beta now allows streamlined access to "view anyone's favorite projects," revealed a member of the project's team, adding that the new development milestone also offers "new profile pages, with easier ways to view people’s projects, friends, recent activity, and more [as well as the possibility to] earn badges by creating compelling content, being a good game player, making friends, or just being lucky!"

 

Microsoft has of course also managed to deal with a wide variety of bugs affecting the service, as well as deliver performance enhancements. This on top of the advanced options introduced for professional coders, as well as the new features made available for mashup creation.

 

Game creators are now able to leverage options such as "Undo support for actor appearance editing; Insert images and videos directly into your actor or scene, Play audio from the Web or an uploaded file without custom code, Customize actor edges with a simple drag-and-drop view, Nudge elements into their proper positions with arrow keys, Preview any scene inside the motion dialog and custom code dialog, Jump to any scene when playing a game in the Play editor," the company informed.