MICROSOFT POPFLY IS DEAD

Microsoft's Popfly, a place to create games and game mashups, closed down on August 24. Although all the site's users lost their accounts, Popfly is far from completely dead. Microsoft has open-sourced the code and put it on Codeplex, free to be used by any aspiring game makers out there.

Of course, features that depend on the now-defunct site, like high scores, aren't included, but someone ambitious could host them in the future. On the Popfly page at CodePlex, the developers have left some suggestions for directions people could take with the code:

• *Example code for a simple, general purpose Silverlight game engine
• Create a Silverlight 3 scene / actor / behavior editor for the data format and make new games
• Porting the engine to run your games on other platforms, like XBox 360 or Zune via XNA Game Studio or client PC via WPF
• Building a copy of the game engine to use with your game data to post on your website.
• Fix multi-actor collision resolution and make Lots O' Peas go faster!
• Add new features like grid-based terrain, dialog trees, etc
  

I'm not sure how likely it is that any of this will actually get done, but there have to be some coders out there with time on their hands.