Last week Microsoft released the Popfly Game Creator and I spent some time with it today. Built on Silverlight 1.0, it’s a good move by Microsoft and while you won’t be creating anything revolutionary with it, it’s fairly simple to use and it hits a market that Flash has had cornered for years. The most diverse example I saw was a game called The Adventures of Noodle Girl (pictured) which showed off a bunch of interactions and behaviors. You can also go into the editor and “tweak” the game to see how it works.
The editor is pretty straight forward and fairly easy to use. They’ve got a lot of stock artwork and behaviors that make it pretty easy to start building a game. Along with the ability to tweak some of the other games and start from a template, anyone interested in browser-based game development should find it fun. As Webware notes, there is currently no integration between the Popfly mashup tool and the game which would be a really cool twist. After you create a game you can take it and embed it on a blog or Facebook page as you’d expect.
So is it a good Silverlight showcase? Sort of. I had some small performance issues on my Vista machine and the fact that it’s Silverlight 1.0 and not Silverlight 2 is somewhat limiting. The Popfly site has really evolved into an interesting portal for letting anyone create interesting Silverlight content so as they upgrade the site to Silverlight 2 I think you’ll see more meaningful examples and applications. But it’s a step in the right direction and casual games are a great way to get viral penetration.
