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