A new app called Playbyte wants to clone the TikTok vertical scrolling experience to facilitate the discovery of simple, user-developed 2D games.
The application, which was recently released on iOS, it offers a vertically scrollable interface that is virtually identical to TikTok, with “like” and “comment” buttons on the right and the added ability to launch a full screen feed where you can try out the games you’ve played. In accordance with TechCrunch, this feed, like TikTok, is algorithmically designed to be more personalized to your tastes over time, which means that the games that appear are more likely to adapt to your preferences when you interact with them the most. .
It’s true that Playbyte’s offerings are rudimentary, so don’t expect PlayStation 5 graphics or games anytime. In fact, it would probably be best to prepare for the most primitive gaming experience imaginable, as most of the creations featured on Playbyte are some stylistic variations of cowboy hat emojis dodging falling blocks. Actually, scratch: these games are weird, so you probably can’t do anything to prepare for their surreality.
Scrolling through Playbyte is like getting into that weird one YouTube wormhole where people make videos designed to look and sound like they’re for kids, but then Elsa starts talking in an inexplicably gravely voice and pulls out a cartoon machete. Because all games are user-generated and presumably because Playbyte has just been released, the degree of verification of this content is not immediately clear. What this means in practice is that the application the standard rate so far is based on emoji games where users can navigate mazes to overcome “levels” at best, and simulated bank robberies and murder scenarios at worst.
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Playbyte has been intentional in terms of its setup, setting itself up not only as a game development platform, but also as a social networking space in itself, where users can follow and support each other and also exchange resources. games and custom logic. This means that other resources can easily recycle resources, leading to a game that at the same time feels suspicious of familiar and strange.
“Basically, we want it to be very easy for people who aren’t so ambitious to still feel like creators of productive and creative games,” CEO Kyle Russell told TechCrunch. “The key is to have an idea–as an image of a game in your mind–you should be able to quickly search for new resources or combine others you’ve previously saved. And then enter them and combine them–almost like Legos–and build something that is 90% of what you imagined, without any other configuration on your part. “
Finally, Playbyte wants to earn revenue with its feed with the help of a patronage model and some form of brand advertising, but these developments are still a long way off. For now, the app is just a weird little pioneer in the video game space, trying to do for games what Instagram did for photos and TikTok for videos.