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Feature: Turns out that standing still is pretty hard
The unknowable chaos of physics in Totally Accurate Battle Simulator
“A lot of fun stuff happens when you try to do stuff with physics,” says Wilhelm Nylund, head of Landfall Games, and the intelligent god behind Totally Accurate Battle Simulator’s legions of gangling warriors. And yet physics has given him an enormous amount of grief over the course of TABS’ development - as well as all the other games he’s made at Landfall. Physics, after…
Feature: Game dev is hell
This is The Mechanic, where Alex Wiltshire invites developers to discuss the difficult journeys they’ve taken to make their games. This time, Jalopy [official site]. ”A lot of people have made the correlation between game development being a janky mess and the car in the game being a janky mess,” says Greg Pryjmachuk, the sole developer of Jalopy, a game about driving a Laika 601…
Feature: The mechanic of a bloody mess
This is The Mechanic, where Alex Wiltshire invites developers to discuss the inner workings of their games. This time, Viscera Cleanup Detail [official site]. Viscera Cleanup Detail is a game about cleaning. You’ll wash blood and slime from floors and walls and pick up rubbish, bullet casings and body parts. Your slop will spill, your ichor-covered boots will leave prints over surfaces you’ve worked hard…
Feature: The long arm of the maw
This is The Mechanic, where Alex Wiltshire invites developers to discuss the inner workings of their games. This time, Little Nightmares [official site]. The figures you encounter in Little Nightmares are grotesque. Disproportioned and baggy in places they shouldn’t be, the way they look is one thing, but it’s the way they move that really clinches the deal. Their staggering, shuffling and lumbering captures the…
Demos for new physics technologies usually look like Bodyform commercials, with gentle blue water sloshing around and lots of smooth rippling fabric. That's how Nvidia have shown their new unified particle-based physics tech PhysX Flex so far - lots of rubbery water balloons flopping about and leaking blue wet. Pssh, it won't look like that in the games we actually play. Killing Floor 2 [official…
Deck 16's Impulse is a deceptively simple game on paper. All it asks of you is to guide a little neon circle (a.k.a. "your craft") from point A to point B and notice how gloriously fun those ancient, physics-based propulsion mechanics still are. Intriguingly it does consider itself a mash-up of Super Meat Boy and Lunar Lander too. The fact that it starts off with fourteen…
BeamNG.drive reads like someone is attempting to talk after a visit to the dentist, though I've no idea what they'd be saying or what the context would be. "Brian, Drive!", maybe? Now that Brian has the wheel, I can pay more attention to what BeamNG.drive actually is: a game about the joy of realistically crumpling cars. It's been out for a while, though it still…
Strangely named car-smashers Beam.ng have been teasing us for years with their awesome car destruction physics engine. Each video has been the torque of RPS, showing cars colliding with mountains and other cars. The crumpled the hoods, the torn off wheels, the cool slow-motion smaaaaassssshhhheees. I had to clutch my girlfriend each time I realised I couldn't yet play it. Well there some things you…
Don't be fooled by the punning title, Colour Bind looks like a game that will be pretty much impossible for the colour blind to play. It's a physics puzzlers where gravity is not defined by weight, but rather by colour. For instance, if that level has green set to up, and red to down, those are the directions in which such objects will fall. Driving…
Feature: Robo-physics!
Indies Talawa Games have released their first game, Unmechanical, on Steam, GOG, Onlive and Gamersgate. It's a physics puzzler about a cute little robot, trapped inside a peculiar machine. But is it good? Here's Wot I Think:
In response to our various sightings of Crysis 3, the RPS stronghold is currently flying these flags: blue with green braiding, taupe with a cyan crucifix and burple with vibrant lavender thistle emblems. And we all know what that says about our opinions on Crytek's next shooter. Even as we debate the openy worlidiness or lack thereof of Prophet's latest alien-hectoring rampage, it's worth keeping…
After peasant-pleasing and/or poking comes castle crashing. Firefly promised to show more of the militant aspect of Stronghold 3 and here’s a video which does just that. See castle walls crumble and tiny men topple from them, reduced to nothing more than ragdolls. Hear a polite British man explain that the medieval era is an ideal showcase for physics. I was hoping they’d be using…
It's been a long time since we had any coverage of Vessel, Strange Loop Games' intriguing 2D puzzle-adventure. That all changes right now. With the game due for release this winter, the team have released a new trailer to show how far things have come in the last eighteen months. Already a finalist in IGF's technical excellence category for 2010, the game's artwork and complex…
The joy of Flash games is so often their simplicity. Simple concepts delivered in a quick-n-fun way, to offer a twenty minute lunchtime distraction. Not a word of this applies to IncrediBots. (Apart from "Flash", "fun" and "a" - so okay, three words apply). This is hardcore. It's a remarkably complex mix of mechanics and physics, currently in beta, letting you build and play with…
There aren't enough games in which you're indestructible. Even in Superman games and Hulk games you're kept Earthly by health and energy bars. Madness! There's nothing wrong with a good old power fantasy, but developers seem determined not to indulge us. This webgame does. In Boombot, you can fall down a hole and have to restart the level, but that's more error than death as…
I hated physics more than any other class at school. And not just because of the time my teacher slammed me in the side of the neck with an exercise book, causing me to black out for 3 seconds. It was mostly because my brain seems to have some inherent inability to accommodate the kind of thinking necessary to understand forces and elasticity and so…
Everyone I know who tips me off for great Flash games has been nagging me to play Totem Destroyer. I did, and you know, it just wasn't for me. I finished it quite quickly, and never really felt the love. However, wiser people did, so I pass it on to you. It's from the reliable Armor Games, made by Gabriel Ochsenhofer, and using Erin Catto's…
It's interesting (and occasionally horrifying) what you can dig up by typing random things into YouTube. I just discovered the beta test of a physics game, Polluted Planet (danger - initially noisy website), which is about cleaning up a level using oil-on-water type particle interactions. It's a pretty clever piece of design, even though it locked up my browser a couple of times during play.…
Mr Walaber has recently come to some fame. His gorgeously wobbly JellyCar physics game is now available on the Xbox Live, as part of the XNA doodah (this stands for "XNA's Not Acronymed", in a peculiar moment of Microsoft doing a Free Software gag). (Head here and you can play it on your PC). But we're here today to look at his next game, Gymnast.
Emil Ernerfeldt is studying at Umeå University in Sweden. For his masters' thesis project, he's developed a 2D physics engine, Phun, that's part toy, part educational medium. He describes it thusly: "Phun is an educational, entertaining and somewhat addictive piece of software for designing and exploring 2D multi-physics simulations in a cartoony fashion. It is part of our long term mission to bring visual physics…
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