Developed by Blade Games World, Jumala is a free-to-play online game-development title that allows players to try their hand at game creation. Jumala is, in essence, a meaty suite of accessible tools that players can use to design their own game environments – like a souped-up, less-blocky Minecraft. Jumala entered its open beta phase earlier this month, allowing everyone take part in game creation.
What makes Jumala appealing is it’s relatively simple and accessible interface. Jumala provides an extremely robust building platform that players can play and experiment with. Users need no programing experience whatsoever, but the interface is very easy to understand and utilize, and gives players near limitless control over the world and its features.
Environmental manipulation is at the heart of Jumala. Players choose from a variety of templates, but have tremendous control over how to design and landscape the terrain, or fiddle with the physics, size and effects of features within environments. Players can add or remove props to their liking and give them special properties, or change the lighting and fog effects to change the atmosphere of the world. Jumala is game-like in that building abilities are awarded through levels, so the more players build and shape their game-worlds, the more experience they accrue, which in turn unlocks new building options.
The open beta improves functionality and adds new features to Jumala, including better landscaping conformity and physics, more interactive items/props (over 800 at the moment), enriched graphics, and more. Created games can be published to the Jumala community, allowing other players to play in the world, and vice-versa.
While Jumala only supports Windows systems at them moment, a Mac version is being considered. For more information, or to download the current version of Jumala, be sure to visit the official website.
