Strongman Games announced this week the launch of the OhMyGame closed beta. OhMyGame aims to be the most efficient, user-friendly game development toolset for use in a web browser. The platform will focus heavily on the social aspects of game development, allowing users to share their code, assets and levels with other OhMyGame users. In this Gamasutra interview, co-founder Erlend Grefsrud discusses OhMyGame’s goal of providing game development tools that are accessible to anyone, not just coders. What’s your pitch with omga.me? In brief, OhMyGame lets you make games in your browser, share all your code, assets and levels across a social network and output for a number of platforms. It is a web-based, fully integrated game development suite with heavy emphasis on sharing. It’s all the tools you need to make 2D games, such as a visual code editor, level editor, UI tools, sound tools and testing facilities. The goal is to make sure absolutely every single thing authored in OhMyGame can be reused and shared, to reward experimentation and collaboration. The overall goal is to make game development – or rather game design – accessible to way more people than is the case today. Our visual programming is not your traditional UML-based spaghettigeddon, nor is it quite as formalistic as Scratch. Instead, it’s based on a simple cause-effect model. We present a library of logic blocks, divided into causes and effects. Causes perform checks, such as collision testing or distances between objects, which then trigger effects that handle movement, calculations, spawning objects and so on. Everything you need to make games has been encapsulated in these blocks and we will add more and more over time. You arrange your game logic by dragging and dropping these logic blocks to form behaviors. These behaviors can then be shared or reused across projects, making gameplay code into something really malleable and generalized without oversimplification. The idea is to turn programming into design. (via Gamasutra – News – Can OhMyGame! Democratize Game Development Through The Browser?)