Your drawings solve puzzles in innovative PC game
— -- Innovation is flourishing in the video game world. A few weeks back, this column gushed about the independently created game World of Goo, a delightful puzzle story about building structures with balls and bands of sticky goo.
This week, our hats go off to Crayon Physics Deluxe, another indie game and the one that beat out "World of Goo" for the grand prize at the 2008 Independent Games Festival.
Developed by Finnish game maker Petri Purho, the game was released Jan. 7 for play on Windows-based computers. Families interested in the game can first download a demo before buying it at www.crayonphysics.com for $19.95.
What makes Crayon Physics Deluxe so special is that it is a puzzle game set in a familiar, childlike environment of crumpled paper with crayon drawings. And yet, this juvenile environment houses a powerful physics engine that turns your scribblings into objects that have weight and mass.
The game consists of 76 puzzles, which all share the same goal: get the little red ball to roll over to the yellow star. Your cursor is a crayon and you can draw anything that you can imagine to solve the puzzle.
At first, solving a puzzle can be as simple as drawing a line between the ball and the star and clicking on the ball to get it to start rolling. But you will quickly learn how to draw objects that fall, as well as platforms and ramps.
As you progress through the puzzles, new concepts are introduced through drawn instructions. In one, you will see a small round pushpin and a dotted picture of how to draw a mallet around a pin. When you draw it, the mallet rotates around the pin, hits the ball and makes it roll over to the star. From there, the puzzles get more challenging by introducing levers and pulleys.
The puzzles are distributed over eight islands that slowly unlock as you solve the earlier puzzles. Puzzles can be solved in many ways and that is the genius of this game. As explained by Purho: "Coming up with creative solutions is what the game is really about."
Related Stories
ABC News Live