Jumala Preview

What if your friend built a game, and you could take out your red pen and mark it as you go? Better yet, what if you could pause the game, play around with it, and share your alterations with other friends, family members, and the community at large? That’s the concept behind Jumala, a PC title that brings game creation to the players. No programming experience necessary.

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Jumala for the PC lets you build your own games, and muck around with your friends’ games

What if your friend built a game, and you could take out your red pen and mark it as you go? Better yet, what if you could pause the game, play around with it, and share your alterations with other friends, family members, and the community at large? That’s the concept behind Jumala, a PC title that brings game creation to the players. No programming experience necessary.

With Jumala, you can start a game from scratch, or you can edit a game in progress by accessing the Jumala arcade. The game’s interface is easy to use, and by making and tweaking your own games, you can earn “Spark,” the in-game currency. Spark can be used in the Jumala store, which is where you’ll find everything you need to make your awesome-rad adventure: props, textures, enemies, and anything you can think of.

But Jumala‘s most noteworthy element is its community. You can collaborate with other builders, share ideas, trade games, and modify already-existing worlds. The more friends who play your game, the more Spark you earn. You use that Spark to keep on building, and the cycle of game development goes on and on and on.

Jumala is currently in beta, and it will probably remain that way because the game will never be “finished”–though the team expects to have most of the major features up and running by 2012. Even so, there will always be a flow of new content from the Jumala team, not to mention the constant flow of content from the users.

Jumala is free to play! Visit the game’s webpage to grab everything you need to start building and sharing your own games.

In the early aughts, Nadia fell into writing with the grace of a brain-dead bison stumbling into a chasm. Over the years, she's written for Nerve, GamePro, 1UP.com, USGamer, Pocket Gamer, Just Labs Magazine, and many other sites and magazines of fine repute. She's currently About.com's Guide to the Nintendo 3DS at ds.about.com.