$20 Game of the Week: Crayon Physics Deluxe (PC)

If you have been paying attention, you’ll notice that there is a revolution going on in gaming. The independent gaming scene has been getting bigger and bigger these past few years. Freely available open-source tools such as Gimp and Blender, as well as the accessibility of easy to learn programming languages such as Python and Blender have made game programming easier than ever, and there is more of an incentive for indie developers to get started as well. Microsoft’s Xbox Live Marketplace features sections for independently made games, while indie developed games such as Everyday Shooter, Braid, and Dishwasher: Dead Samurai have been swiped up by big name companies, releasing them on various download services to critical acclaim. These games are going way beyond DIY shooters and puzzle games, introducing unique methods of story telling and gameplay mechanics. Crayon Physics, developed by Petri Purho, is one of the most recent faces of the indie gaming movement. It won first place at the 2008 independent games festival, and it puts many mainstream-developed games to shame.

Crayon Physics has a unique look, depicting a child’s crayon drawing on a piece of paper. However, the things on the screen are actually objects, driven by actual real-world physics. There are catapults, levers, pulleys, and objects to knock over. Your goal is to get a ball to touch a star. How do you do this? All you have to do is draw. Everything you draw becomes an actual object. You can draw lines for bridges, boxes, spheres, and other shapes to use them in order to manipulate the level physics. It’s this mechanic that makes Crayon Physics like no other before it. A demo version can be downloaded from the site at http://crayonphysics.com, and you can pay $20 for the full version to gain access to a level editor, 70 levels, and an online community where you can share and download user-made creations. Although the free version was ported to the Nintendo DS as homebrew, an official Nintendo DS release would be awesome, especially as Hudson Soft released an IPhone version. You should definitely check this game out. You’ll find out why more people were talking about it than they were talking about Gears of War II at the 2008 Game Developer’s Conference. The independent game scene has come a long way since making Doom and Half Life mods, and Crayon Physics shows it.