I’m not really big on playing computer games that leave you sitting at your computer for days on end, but that doesn’t mean I don’t play games. A new game that is in the works, called Crayon Physics, is the epitome of what I love in a game: fun, increasingly difficult, and extremely creative.
I just got done playing a no-install needed prototype of Crayon Physics, and it is so interesting that you are bound to get addicted by it. Your goal is to get the ball from the starting point over to the star, and all the while you draw shapes on the screen. The shapes all behave like they would in real life with gravity, which is what really makes this fun. To see what I’m talking about checkout this video of Crayon Physics in action on a Tablet PC:
Unfortunately the prototype is a bit rough around the edges, includes only a few levels, and doesn’t have a lot of the sweet features the deluxe version in the demo does. For example, you can’t draw a car and have it drive, or create pivot points in the demo version.
Here are the key shortcuts for demo:
- With left mouse button you can draw and with right you can remove objects.
- Space – Will reset the level.
- Esc – Will open the menu.
- Alt + enter – Will toggle fullscreen.
- Alt + F4 – Will quit the game.
I’m assuming that when Crayon Physics Deluxe is released it will cost some money to pickup, but if it comes with a lot of levels I’ll surely be getting myself a copy.
That is quite possibly the coolest game I have ever played.
I’m really looking forward to the deluxe version.
This game seems to rely on some SDL libraries (which originated from Linux as far as I know) but I just can’t get it to load with Wine. Too bad.
One thing that I also noticed was that it has an extensible level system. In one of the developers blog posts he links to some other levels that had been made by users, which is another really awesome idea.
That would have been pretty cool if it worked under Wine.
It ran fine in Wine for me, but there are two gotchas:
1) you have to have the Visual C++ 6 runtime redistributable libraries
installed. Easiest way to get them is
wget kegel.com/wine/winetricks
sh winetricks vcrun6
2) you have to have timidity configured and working. First make sure
timidity is up by downloading a .mid file from somewhere and making
sure you can play it with
timidity foo.mid
Then copy /etc/timidity/timidity.cfg to the current directory
before starting the game. Sheesh. I had to use WINEDEBUG=+file to
figure that out. Not sure whose fault this one is…