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?