A super great night with Gamefroot

Last night the City Gallery played host to the launch of Game­f­root, a new plat­form on which to build plat­form games — or more specif­i­cal­ly, a HTML5 Game Cre­ation tool.

If you can use a web brows­er and if you can use mouse to click and drag – then you can use Game­f­root. The bar has final­ly been low­ered – oth­er peo­ple have promised it but none have been as easy as this, with Game­f­root you no longer need to be a pro­gram­mer to make games!

What is awe­some about Game­f­root in my opin­ion? Game­f­root allows you to make awe­some games. It allows you to make big games, small games, adven­ture games, hap­py games, sad games, sto­ry based games, space games, sci-fi games, and with our Scratch-based user Inter­face for cre­at­ing advanced behav­iors, you can pret­ty much make any type of game your imag­i­na­tion can come up with.

It’s true, the inter­face IS super easy to use.…

I was wor­ried that there’d be a down­er note on the night in which we’d troop into the the­atre for a pre­sen­ta­tion and not be allowed to take our wine through (hor­ror of hor­rors!) but in fact, we were able to watch from the main room as some kids built their own game for the event spon­sors Hell Piz­za. Y’all know my feel­ing on kids at events where I am drink­ing, but these ones were super awe­some, engaged in what they were doing, and cre­at­ing some pret­ty sweet stuff.

Some­one else who’d cre­at­ed his own game was Weta artist Greg Broad­more (fun fact: one of the biggest search engine terms for vis­its to the ‘ista), who demoed Lord Cock­swain in V for Venu­sians DM.

Once you’ve made a game, you can share it on the site, or embed it into oth­er web pages. Intrigu­ing­ly, you can also remix games, which I might take up doing if only to cor­rect some of the apos­tro­phes in the oth­er games I’ve tried, like The Young Issac about Sir Issac New­ton (see, you can play and learn at the same time!).

Thanks for such a fun par­ty! The wine and tasty beers from Hashigoza­ke flowed freely, the room was stacked with a bril­liant mix of good peo­ple to talk to, there were appro­pri­ate tunes from TV Disko and a very ener­getic set from Dis­as­tera­dio, and piz­za topped with my favorite schaden­freude sausage. Our Anna Dean knows how to throw a great launch! More impor­tant­ly, while the Game­f­root team are still work­ing on the iPhone part, it looks like the site has but­t­loads of poten­tial. Now can some­one build us a Welling­ton­ista game please?