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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 \u2014 not their most interesting game, sure, but an interactive experience nonetheless.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe 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\u2019ll have made a game and released it,\u201d Buckenham said. \u201cThat\u2019s the kind of thing I want to be possible.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\u2019s 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. <\/p>\n

Polygon spoke to Buckenham via Zoom last week to chat about this community of creators making new tools \u2014 including Downpour, which Buckenham hopes will come out this year.<\/p>\n

[Ed. note:<\/strong> This interview has been edited for length and clarity.]<\/p>\n

Polygon: I\u2019d love to start by hearing about you and your history in the video game industry.<\/strong><\/p>\n

V Buckenham: <\/strong>I\u2019ve been around the games industry for about 10 years, around the indie space. I worked with Die Gute Fabrik on Mutazione<\/em>, which you might know \u2014 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<\/em>, which was a digital and physical stacking game. The company got acquired by Niantic, so in the last couple of years at Niantic, I worked on stuff that is still unannounced.<\/p>\n

Basically, I was there long enough to earn money to buy a house and put together some savings. I left to go do my own things. Since then I\u2019ve been working on a couple of things, but the main thing I\u2019ve been working on is Downpour. The other thing, which is not actually video games, but it\u2019s pretty relevant to Downpour, is that I was involved in the Twitter bot community around five to seven years ago and made a site called Cheap Bots Done Quick. There\u2019s, like, tens of thousands of people using it to host Twitter bots. That\u2019s my biggest, most notable creative tool. I think the fact that I\u2019d made that gives me a lot of confidence that I can make something and it\u2019s going to find users. It\u2019s going to enable a wave of people to do things they otherwise wouldn\u2019t do.<\/p>\n