

An Ingenious Video Game That Looks Like It Was Designed by a Third-Grader - gensym
http://www.slate.com/id/2186848/

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thorax
I'm a huge fan of this sort of game. If interested, you should also check out
Phun: <http://phun.cs.umu.se/wiki>

Not crayony or goal-oriented, but a lot of the same physics sandbox concepts.
Oh, and you can download it right now.

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r7000
To see Phun in action, do a search on youtube. The (mostly) Japanese rocket
makers are especially fun to watch.

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mosburger
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!

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moog
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.

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jcromartie
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.

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gibsonf1
It looks very similar to the MIT whiteboard physics sketching app.
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NZNTgglPbUA>

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huhtenberg
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.

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barrettcolin
> 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>

An enterprising chap has also ported the original C++ code to Flash:
<http://box2dflash.sourceforge.net>

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youngnh
"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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dustineichler
I loved it personally. Inspired actually. Submit more links like this.

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thorax
I submitted it a while back, but it didn't get as good reception.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=122548>

I think adjectives are necessary in the title to convey how cool it is, maybe.

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pchristensen
Plus the Slate article explained it well.

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brent
It looks like a crayon version of working model 2d from a decade ago.

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mhb
But will probably cost a few thousand dollars less.
<http://workingmodel.design-simulation.com/WM2D/index.php>

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mynameishere
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.

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rms
I played the beta a while ago on my tablet PC; it was clever, a good concept,
but kind of buggy and not that fun. Maybe it's gotten better since then.

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juanpablo
I've played it on the iphone and it's unexpectedly addictive.

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tonyvt2005
Very cool. Reminds me of the LineRider game.

