The cuddly joyful happy place that is Crayon Physics Deluxe now has its beta demo available for anyone who’s pre-ordered. Which you really should have. You can do so here. This early behind-closed-doors demo from Kloonigames’ Petri Purho contains the first 18 levels of the game, along with access to a limited version of the level creation tools, letting you set your own challenges. It’s the first chance for people to get their hands on the Deluxe version of things, and see quite how many leaps and bounds forward this is since the original Crayon Physics.
There’s some interesting changes since I played the game a year ago, and all of them good. It’s more slick, simpler to get the ball rolling, and on a much bigger scale. There’s new music, and a lovely way of laying out the levels. But the level design tool most caught my attention here. It’s so incredibly simple to use (albeit in a restricted form this time). Once you’ve created your challenge, they upload in-game, and appear on the website, but as yet you can’t play other people’s levels. That’s all for later in the beta. You’ll need to have pre-ordered to have an account so you can do any of this. Which I strongly recommend you do. It’s looking really rather fantastic.
Here’s the tablet video again, because it’s just so fun:
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This is exciting, but not so exciting it couldn’t have waited till morning. Get some sleep John.
Can’t wait to play all the dong themed levels.
It can’t be good my best solutions to many of the levels look like penises.
A living tradition.
I feel awful but the demo really didn’t click with me, I found that about 15 of the 18 levels were easily solved by ignoring whatever framework the level designer had placed and just drawing a line from A to B and then making the ball roll.
Perhaps I’m just not being imaginative enough but I find it hard to be creative about a solution if there is already a boring but glaringly obvious one staring me in the face.
I do love the art style and the actual mechanic of having your drawing come to life like Penny Crayon playing Armadillo Run so I’m still going to check out the full version; I just hope that it the later levels contain some of the genius level design and “AHA!” moments that made World of Goo so great.
Agreed they look damn simple on that demo vid. However in Armadillo I spent a lot of the later levels bashing through the prebuilt stuff to get to the exit quickest, it worked well, so that’s not immune from the same thing.
My worry is that this:
http://www.bubblebox.com/play/puzzle/975.htm
has beaten him to it.
Yeah, the levels do get harder quite quickly. And remarkably imaginative. You end up creating little vehicles, or building elaborate mechanisms.
Got my beta key yesterday and played a few levels; yep, there were simple but I had guessed they would be.
I hope there’s an option to use the music from the original game, which I love.
Finished the beta at lunchtime, and I concur with the linearity. I managed to complete every screen bar one with either a line or a box. Am a little disappointed; I’m just hoping that the full version is more fiendish.
P.
is much better!!!! Look for it in januar 2009.
Phun is much better i mean :-S
http://www.phunland.com