Microsoft Simplifies Game Development With Popfly Game Creator
Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) on Friday announced the alpha release of Popfly Game Creator, a mashup authoring tool for the creation of casual computer games.
A blog post on the Popfly team site explains that Game Creator can be used to create "any kind of two-dimensional game, a category that includes things like the original Super Mario, Frogger, Asteroids, and a host of other old arcade games. To make it easy, Popfly is still focused on getting as much done as possible without having to write any code."
John Montgomery, group program manager at Microsoft for Popfly and Visual Studio Express, explained in a phone interview that Microsoft's goal was to build an on-ramp to ease people into programming.
"We're really trying to get people who have never tried programming before to get excited about the ideas of building things in general, whether its Web pages, or mashups, or in this case games," said Montgomery. "So we're kind of going after a customer who is anywhere from the 8- to 14-year-old kid might be interested in playing around to somebody who's maybe a little older and is bored with the games on a site like MSN Game Zone and is actually interested in building his own."
