I made a Downpour about travelling to a recent March for Palestine in London. You can play it here, it works great on mobile thanks to V's amazing Downpour tool, which I am in love with. Downpour is an accessible game-making tool that is fun and easy to use. With that said, making Downpours has been one of the most fascinating creative tasks I've undertaken in a long time, and I wanted to explore why a little bit, so here's a post about designing games about experiences you're having right now, and some making of tidbits for the March DP.
I've had a few moments lately where I've thought "this would be an interesting Downpour". Often I want to tell the story of a journey or an experience, and you begin to think about what you want the DP to actually be, what you want the player to do, or be able to do. Some DPs are entirely linear - almost like a slideshow where you get some context from the designer through text and other image overlays. These work really well and my favourites of these are often very poetically written and expressive in a way I don't think I could hope to be. Some DPs are nonlinear, but are designed in very controlled spaces. Terry Cavanagh's superlative A Proper Cup Of Tea is a good example of this. The game has a lot of fun with branching, but all the elements can be relatively easily controlled (although Terry did have to take photos of a lot of liquid combos, his commitment to the bit is truly incredible).
Doing nonlinearity in uncontrolled spaces is a bit harder. For example, while waiting for the train I took the above photo, thinking I would follow it up with sitting on the bench. But I thought the player might also be drawn to tap on the end of the platform where there's a "No Passengers" sign. Because I'm taking photos long before I make the DP, I'm working completely speculatively. But if I want to have this branch as a possibility, I need to take photos from both spots. So I sat down and took a few for drinking coffee on the bench waiting, then went and took some from the end of the platform, then hurried back to the bench to catch the shot of the train arriving from the perspective of the bench. Even this very small single branching point was very time sensitive - and without waiting for a second train, some photos would be impossible to get (for example, the moment of arrival from both the bench and the platform).
This adds quite an exciting tension to speculatively photographing an event for a Downpour, especially an event like a march and especially in a location like central London. If you notice a branching point that might be interesting to record, you need to react quite fast before either a) the setting changes so much that it looks like a continuity error or b) the other branches you want to record disappear. a) isn't too much of a problem really - people won't mind if some people move around a bit in some of the shots. But b) can happen really easily. Suppose you're walking in the march and see a cool sign you want to get a close-up of in case the player wants to click on it. If you move over to take a photo of it, you can't then walk back against the flow of the march to resume taking photos from the path you would've taken. Or if you're recording something transient (like a bus that's stopped to take on passengers) and something else changes temporarily (like the cute dog you were hoping to take a photo of leaves with its owner) your plan for a systemic joke or branching point might be broken.
I'm also struggling to decide what kind of visual/interaction language to use in the DPs. There are a couple of easter eggs in March which are entirely unlabelled, depending on where you click the screen. The only problem is there's absolutely no hint they exist. I feel like a lot of DP designs are quite explicit with choices for the player, and if there are no choices then tapping the screen is a general "advance the game" sign. On the other hand, labelling the choices in some cases feels like something I don't want to do. I'm gonna keep adding them as secret things for now and see how they go (the above screen you get if you tap on the counterprotesters that you encounter halfway through your journey to the march).
None of these things are problems, I should add, instead I just found it fascinating how it made me aware of the texture of my journeys, what things were possible to record and what things weren't, how to communicate choice and how to leave surprises. It's also interesting to think about how Downpours, especially autobiographical ones, often are there to relay the account of a linear, personal experience (like walking across London) but the designer may aspire to provide multiple branches to that single thread which requires them to act out parallel branches in sequence in their real life. Figuring out that ordering (like taking a photo at two spots on a platform before rushing onto a train) is also a nice brain exercise.
My original Downpour idea was to make a LEGO stage and then make a simple escape-the-room game. I'd still like to do this at some point but I abandoned the idea because it was a little hard to do stateful change without the possibilities exploding. For example, I had the (unnecessarily stupid) idea to allow you to have an inventory of items, and then use them on things. But even with a single item that you can find, this means any scene in which you could have the item can be seen in three ways: without the item, with the item, and with the item selected to be used. More items compounds this. It's obviously not impossible to do (and some might argue is a completely silly thing to do in Downpour anyway, which I wouldn't exactly disagree with) but I didn't want to tackle it right now. I'm still thinking about it though!
I love Downpour and I love the unexpected surprises I've found in its design space and in how it forces me to think about constructing something out of fragments of real experiences. You should definitely download it and give it a try - it's completely free and it probably runs on your phone. If you've made a DP (or make one as a result of this post!) please let me know in the comments and give me a link! ☔️
