Arcade Berg Game Designer

PowerPoint Games

I helped my girlfriend with using PowerPoint earlier and while screwing around with the animations and triggers it hit me that you can make for some decent kiddie-games in PowerPoint. And since then, I can't stop thinking about it. I tried going to sleep but I just lied there making plans for an adventure game that would be possible to do using nothing but PowerPoint. It's awesome!

It has support for graphics, sound effects, triggers, mouse clicks, timing and text as output well as input. With all those tools, you should really be able to do something!

So I just got up again, it's the middle of the night and I've been googling. There are actually quite a few educational PowerPoint games out there but they all seem to... Suck. Hard. Big time. That's too bad really. But one could ask, why make a "game" in PowerPoint when there's Flash, etc. My answer is; because of the fun of it and because it's possible.

I'm gonna prototype!

Update: 45 minutes later and I got a prototype "up and running". It's just a proof of concept, but it does what it's supposed to. You can click on the door, the lock, the key and the window with the ladder. You can climb out, get the key and unlock the door. Feel free to try it. Nothing fancy. I'm happy, maybe I can finally get some sleep.

Download The Castle Game

http://arcadeberg.com/files/2010/05/The-Castle-Game.pptx (16/5/2010)

Actual in-game screenshot. No post processing!