Nice and moody. The problem with gameplay seems to be: You have to move your circle around my drawing boxes half-way on top of it, thus launching it. Not too clever.
There's also a version for the jail broken iPhone. There's a nice level where the objects on the screen will slip and slide around as you twist and turn the iPhone.
This game looks simple on the surface, but it must have some interesting physics code inside.
This reminds me of a tool that was developed by ParaGraph back in 90s (the same company that developed handwriting recognition for Apple's Newton). Their app allowed creating TrueType characters by drawing a simple raster image. This is stunningly impressive if you consider that TrueType is essentially defined by geometric splines. Converting raster image into a set of curves is an extremely unobvious thing to do, but on the surface the whole thing looked quite ordinary and trivial.
Same thing with Crayon Physics - trivial on the surface, but complex on the inside. And this is what's impressive about it.
> it must have some interesting physics code inside.
You can check it out for yourself: http://box2d.org. You can also download several of the Game Developers Conference presentations given by the original author here: http://www.gphysics.com/downloads
This game kinda reminds me of Sierra's "The Incredible Machine" back in the 90's, where you created a ridiculous Rube Goldberg thing to solve a puzzle. I spent hours on that game. This is like that, except it has realistic-looking physics, and you can create all the parts of the machine by drawing them. It looks cool!
I applaud the author's innovation, but I have to take issue with the recent trend of physics-engine-as-gameplay. I'm not sure if I'm too cynical (I can enjoy this game for a while) but I just don't find them fun in general. Phun (no pun intended) isn't really a "game" to me, it's more of a software toy.
I think it might be because realistic rigid-body physics are still fairly novel in games, and seeing realistic reactions in-game is inherently satisfying for some reason. I think we'll see a continuing rise in the number of "physics-based ______" formula games, followed by a sharp decline.
"Gears of War II will take several years, hundreds of people, and tens of millions of dollars to create."
I read that it was actually 10 programmers working on the Unreal engine and tools and 20 artists doing something with their efforts for 2 years. They did have a $10 million budget, though.
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[ 1.7 ms ] story [ 49.4 ms ] threadNot crayony or goal-oriented, but a lot of the same physics sandbox concepts. Oh, and you can download it right now.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=122548
I think adjectives are necessary in the title to convey how cool it is, maybe.
This reminds me of a tool that was developed by ParaGraph back in 90s (the same company that developed handwriting recognition for Apple's Newton). Their app allowed creating TrueType characters by drawing a simple raster image. This is stunningly impressive if you consider that TrueType is essentially defined by geometric splines. Converting raster image into a set of curves is an extremely unobvious thing to do, but on the surface the whole thing looked quite ordinary and trivial.
Same thing with Crayon Physics - trivial on the surface, but complex on the inside. And this is what's impressive about it.
You can check it out for yourself: http://box2d.org. You can also download several of the Game Developers Conference presentations given by the original author here: http://www.gphysics.com/downloads
An enterprising chap has also ported the original C++ code to Flash: http://box2dflash.sourceforge.net
I think it might be because realistic rigid-body physics are still fairly novel in games, and seeing realistic reactions in-game is inherently satisfying for some reason. I think we'll see a continuing rise in the number of "physics-based ______" formula games, followed by a sharp decline.
I read that it was actually 10 programmers working on the Unreal engine and tools and 20 artists doing something with their efforts for 2 years. They did have a $10 million budget, though.