Have a phone with a camera? You can make games

polygon.com:

V Buckenham pulled up the Downpour app during our Zoom call Friday, and within a few seconds, we were making a game. Buckenham snapped photos of our faces on the screen, then turned the camera on themselves for a selfie. With a few taps on their phone, Buckenham linked these photos together and built a small game out of them — not their most interesting game, sure, but an interactive experience nonetheless.

“The idea is that you can be waiting at a bus stop, download [Downpour], and then by the time you get off your bus at the other end, you’ll have made a game and released it,” Buckenham said. “That’s the kind of thing I want to be possible.”

Buckenham, the founder of Downpour Limited, is part of a community of creators making game design tools with an aim towards making game design more accessible, approachable, and creative. They said it’s not necessarily the singular future of video games, but one of many futures: an option for creators looking to do something different, not a replacement for traditional game-making methods.

Polygon spoke to Buckenham via Zoom last week to chat about this community of creators making new tools — including Downpour, which Buckenham hopes will come out this year.

[Ed. note: This interview has been edited for length and clarity.]

Polygon: I’d love to start by hearing about you and your history in the video game industry.

V Buckenham: I’ve been around the games industry for about 10 years, around the indie space. I worked with Die Gute Fabrik on Mutazione, which you might know — many, many years ago, because that was in development for years. I worked at a start-up called Sensible Object on a game called Beasts of Balance, which was a digital and physical stacking game. The company got