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I’m thinking about writing regularly about my experiences writing Amazing Contraption. This may start out as the first of a series of articles about the game, it’s design, the writing, and the release of it. Or it may just be one very boring self-indulgence. We’ll see.

Anyway the topic of today: Prioritizing functionality over design

Sometimes it’s hard to make things work they way you want them to. Sometimes you cave and do it the easy way. Sometimes you stick it out. I have always believed that this is a major difference between things that are really good and things that kind of suck. Things that are good are made be people who though it out.

So I want to talk about an example of when I didn’t tough it out in Fantastic Contraption and why I think I got away with it.

This is about wheels and sticks. If you want to understand what I’m talking about then go play Fantastic Contraption for a minute. It’s free, suck it up.

So now that you are familiar with wheels and sticks you know that wheels spin when you attach a stick to them. But they don’t, really. The wheel and the stick both turn in relation to each other. The wheel turns the stick just as much as the stick turns the wheel. So you could use the wheel to turn the stick! Bet you didn’t think about that.

And it’s a good thing you didn’t think about that because when you try to use wheels to spin sticks the whole house of cards comes tumbling down.

See you could connect two, three, or three hundred sticks to one wheel. And not all of them can spin. Only one of them can. If more than one did then crazyness would ensue. Trust me it would, no they would not all just synchronously spin in happyness, what if you attached one stick to an anchor? Then the other ones would spin twice as fast! Not a good thing.

But what’s the alternative? Pick a random stick and make that spin? What a suck solution.

It’s also the solution I went with. When you attach more than one rod to a wheel only one of them torques against the wheel. The others just limply swing in the breeze. It took me forever to even try this solution because I thought it would be counter-intuitive and would drive people nuts. I naturally assumed that any break from real-world physics would be jarring. But I was completely wrong. No one notices. You didn’t notice (yes, I know _you_ noticed, how clever you are, but did it hurt your gameplay experience?).

And I think noone notices because in our world wheels spin. Mabey there’s a country out there where cars are chunks of metals wildly spinning around stationary rubber wheels. But in the rest of the world we expect the wheel to start spinning. We don’t scrutinize the forces behind it. We just take for granted that wheels spin. So it doesn’t matter what stick the wheel is attached to. The sticks are just supporting characters.

The lesson here is: think like a human. They take mental shortcuts and sometimes you can get away with taking the same shortcuts in your code.

It is out!

For the last four months I’ve been working on a physics puzzle game called Fantastic Contraption.

I released it to the world yesterday.

It is a building game. You build a machine out of rods and wheels to try to put a ball into the goal. Each level confronts you with a different puzzle and you have to make a suitable contraption to solve it. It borrows alot from existing buliding games but there are a few differences.

Most building games are about building up an environment to accomplish a goal. Like building a bridge or a Rube Goldberg contraption. In Fantastic Contraption the goal is to make a machine that goes off into the environment and accomplishes some goal.

So instead of building a bridge for a basketball to roll across you make a catapult that flings the basketball over the divide. Or make a crawler that carries the ball down into the ravine and then up the other side.

It worked out really well. It’s pretty easy to make insteresting contraptions to accomplish all sorts of things.

From the simplest wheeled cart, to walkers, to ingenious solutions, to imaginative wonders, there’s alot of room for creativity.

If other people like playing it 1/2 as much as I do I think it’s going to be a real winner.

And of course I have to give a quick thanks to the team:

James Mark for the music
Sarah Collins for the art
And Andy Moore for testing and pushing and prodding

Photo by Kanaka’s Paradise Life.
(we haven’t been taking many!)

This city loves a party. Since May there has pretty much been one celebration or another every weekend. Bay to Breakers, a footrace across town started out relatively professional, with many of the runners in inventive costumes or in the buff, but a few hours down the line the race came nearly to a standstill and became a 12k long drunken, naked street party. It entered the park two blocks from our house and was probably the most drunkenness I’ve ever seen before noon.

Then there was Carnaval, the Haight Street Fair, and last weekend the Pride Parade. I found the parade particularly touching because of the number of newlyweds (same-sex marriage once again became legal in San Francisco last month; hopefully it will stick this time).

But we haven’t had all that much time for parties, as we’ve been working hard on Fantastic Contraption, which I’ll let Colin tell you about.

Oh, and I almost forgot – Pete and Leah came to visit which was rad. Yes – rad. We did a tour of The Rock, finally, and enjoyed many a fine alcoholic beverage with them. We’ll be seeing them again soon when we come through Seattle to the Isle of Van at the end of the month for James Mark’s wedding.

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Originally uploaded by caseyrose.

We didn’t bring our camera to the Maker Faire, assuming correctly that other people would take enough pictures of the cool stuff there, like this giant head made of old computer parts that was reciting Through the Looking Glass in a generated voice and showing ascii rendered tv shows on its monitors.

My office shelled out for tickets, which was cool because otherwise we might have been too lazy to make the trip and it was good to have people to go with. It was definitely worth attending; there were plenty of cool creations and workshops going on. Colin soldered together a little pacmanesque game. We witnessed terrifying mechanical beasts ripping apart helpless mannequins. We saw a story-high set of Tesla coils cook hot dogs. It was pretty cool.

The faire is put on by MAKE Magazine, but CRAFT was also well represented with a number of workshops (pin felting was very big) and a sewing swap where people brought bags of old clothes, tore them apart and made new ones out of them. We were very inspired to get on some more physical projects.

The streets of the Maker Faire were filled will strange vehicles, like the organ-mobile and homemade segway, and many more from past Burning Mans. Yes, people call this the lazy man’s burning man, or “nerding man”, but it may be as close as we get. Although there has been talk around the office of getting people together for Burning Man this year and building something, so you never know. ;)

Taking a picture of Meghan taking…
Originally uploaded by apes_abroad.

We’ve been happily entertaining visitors in the last few months, and although we’ve taken woefully few pictures of the events, happily others have taken some for us. First Alan came for a weekend while he was working in Colorado, then we Stephen flew down for GDC week on the Nokia dime. Both of them had terrible luck with the weather, wherein it rained for nearly the first time since we moved here last fall.

Alan has finished his term in the desert and in March came back to visit with Meghan and the Northways (Mom and Dad). We had beautiful weather and took in an extraordinary number of local sights. At Pier 39 Steven was reminded of growing up near the Santa Cruz boardwalk, which we have still yet to visit ourselves. On Alan’s recommendation we went to see Clarion alley in the Mission which was really something.

A few weeks ago we had a visit from the Moores on their way down to San Diego for a Mexican cruise. I took a few days off to hang out and ride cable cars, etc, and drink “flavored beer” beverages that I am still trying to forget the taste of. It was really good to see them since we’d missed them over Christmas. They pretty much drove through the night there and back so they could see us on the way. Thank you. :)

Next, we’re getting our tickets now to come out to the island in August for James Mark’s wedding, via Seattle so we can see Pete & Leah. Looking forward to it!