GigaOM

Bay Area startup ZipZapPlay launched the latest entry in the quickly growing build-and-share-your-own-game space in alpha this week, a service by the name of Playcrafter.

ZipZapPlay CEO Curt Bererton and Chief Creative Officer Mathilde Pignol stopped by the GigaOM office recently to give us a hands-on demo, and what impressed Om and I most was the site’s whimsical beauty. That’s no surprise, as Pignol is an alum of frog design. It offers up a large set of interlocking objects with which to create your games (platforms, widgets, and so on), all of which are designed to work together, then attributes game properties to them. (Think Lego Mindstorms, but for web games.)

I particularly liked the intuitive feel of the building experience, and the robustness of its internal physics — an element that should appeal to all the hundreds of thousands of gamers who embraced Line Rider. Since showing it to us, they’ve added the ability to embed Playcrafter games on blogs and social networks. Even more appealing, they’re sharing revenue with game creators, giving them a cut of revenue earned from ads that are run while games load.

Image credit: www.playcrafter.com.