''Crayon Physics Deluxe'' is a

puzzle video game Puzzle video games make up a broad genre of video games that emphasize puzzle solving. The types of puzzles can test problem-solving skills, including logic, pattern recognition, sequence solving, spatial recognition, and word completion. ...

Petri Purho Petri Purho (born 1983 in Kouvola, Finland) is a Finnish game developer and a cofounder of the game studio Nolla Games. He has previously also worked at Finnish independent video game developer studio Frozenbyte. He is best-known for the rogue ...

and released on January 7, 2009. An early version, titled ''Crayon Physics'', was released for Windows in June 2007. ''Deluxe'' won the grand prize at the

Independent Games Festival The Independent Games Festival (IGF) is an annual festival at the Game Developers Conference (GDC), the largest annual gathering of the independent video game industry. Originally founded in 1998 to promote independent video game developers, ...

in 2008. It features a heavy emphasis on two-dimensional physics

simulations A simulation is the imitation of the operation of a real-world process or system over time. Simulations require the use of Conceptual model, models; the model represents the key characteristics or behaviors of the selected system or proc ...

, including gravity, mass, kinetic energy and transfer of momentum. The game includes a

level editor In video games Video games, also known as computer games, are electronic games that involves interaction with a user interface or input device such as a joystick, controller, keyboard, or motion sensing device to generate visual f ...

and enables its players to download and share custom content via an online service.

Gameplay

The objective of each level in ''Crayon Physics Deluxe'' is to guide a ball from a predetermined start point so that it touches all of the stars placed on the level. The ball and nearly all objects on the screen are affected by

gravity In physics, gravity () is a fundamental interaction which causes mutual attraction between all things with mass or energy. Gravity is, by far, the weakest of the four fundamental interactions, approximately 1038 times weaker than the str ...

. The player cannot control the ball directly, but rather must influence the ball's movement by drawing physical objects on the screen. Depending on how the object is drawn, it becomes a rigid surface, a pivot point, a wheel or a rope, and the object can then interact with the ball by hitting it, providing a surface to roll on, dragging, carrying or launching the ball, etc. The player can also nudge the ball left or right by clicking on it, and in some levels, rockets appear and can be used as part of the solution. The game challenges players to come up with creative solutions to each puzzle, and provides additional rewards for elegant solutions that do not rely on " brute force methods". It comes with more than seventy levels, and also features a

and an online Playground, where players can upload and download custom levels.

Development

''Crayon Physics''

''Crayon Physics'', the original prototype of this game, is Purho's tenth "rapid-prototype project" inspired by the rules of the

Experimental Gameplay Project An experiment is a procedure carried out to support or refute a hypothesis, or determine the efficacy or likelihood of something previously untried. Experiments provide insight into cause-and-effect by demonstrating what outcome occurs when ...

, and was developed in five days using resources freely available under a

Creative Commons license A Creative Commons (CC) license is one of several public copyright licenses that enable the free distribution of an otherwise copyrighted "work".A "work" is any creative material made by a person. A painting, a graphic, a book, a song/lyric ...

. The game was first released for Windows. On June 10, 2007, Purho announced that he would be developing a

to permit user-created levels, although by June 15 fans of the game had already worked out the level format and had released new levels for the game. The level editor was released on June 30. ''Crayon Physics'' was built with Simple DirectMedia Layer middle-layer and released as

freeware Freeware is software, most often proprietary, that is distributed at no monetary cost to the end user. There is no agreed-upon set of rights, license, or EULA that defines ''freeware'' unambiguously; every publisher defines its own rules for t ...

''Crayon Physics Deluxe''

On October 12, 2007, Purho announced ''Crayon Physics Deluxe'', which would feature an intuitive level editor, more levels, and a modification to the game engine to preserve the player's drawings instead of turning them into rectangles. The follow-up took a year and eight months to develop. It won the Seumas McNally Grand Prize at the

in February 2008. Chris Baker of ''Slate Magazine'' also wrote that ''Crayon Physics Deluxe'' was more talked about than '' Gears of War 2'' at the 2008

Game Developers Conference The Game Developers Conference (GDC) is an annual conference for video game developers. The event includes an expo, networking events, and awards shows like the Game Developers Choice Awards and Independent Games Festival, and a variety of tuto ...

. Microsoft Windows,

Mac OS X macOS (; previously OS X and originally Mac OS X) is a Unix operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc. since 2001. It is the primary operating system for Apple's Mac computers. Within the market of desktop and lapt ...

Linux Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, which i ...

and

Android Android may refer to: Science and technology * Android (robot), a humanoid robot or synthetic organism designed to imitate a human * Android (operating system), Google's mobile operating system ** Bugdroid, a Google mascot sometimes referred to ...

versions of this game were released along with Humble Indie Bundle for Android 4 on November 8, 2012.

Platforms

Published by

Hudson Soft was a Japanese video game company that released numerous games for video game consoles, home computers and mobile phones, mainly from the 1980s to the 2000s. It was headquartered in the Midtown Tower in Tokyo Midtown, Akasaka, Minato, Tokyo ...

, ''Crayon Physics Deluxe'' was released for the iOS on January 1, 2009 and in Spring 2010 for the iPhone via Apple's App Store. A version for the PC was released six days later. An unofficial clone was made for the DS, but only in free play mode and under the title of ''Pocket Physics''. A port for Windows Mobile was also made, but later pulled. It can still be downloaded unofficially. Ports for Mac and Linux were announced as available on July 27, 2011. Crayon Physics is pre-loaded on some Android devices including the Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1.

Reception

The PC version received "generally favorable reviews" according to the

review aggregation A review aggregator is a system that collects reviews of products and services (such as films, books, video games, software, hardware, and cars). This system stores the reviews and uses them for purposes such as supporting a website where users ...

website

Metacritic Metacritic is a website that aggregates reviews of films, TV shows, music albums, video games and formerly, books. For each product, the scores from each review are averaged (a weighted average). Metacritic was created by Jason Dietz, Marc ...

References

External links

Official website

Crayon Physics

prototype * * *
Numpty Physics
A free, GPL licensed clone.
Crayon Physics (Android)
at Android-apk.org {{Authority control 2009 video games Android (operating system) games Creative Commons-licensed video games Drawing video games Indie video games IOS games Linux games MacOS games Puzzle video games Seumas McNally Grand Prize winners Windows games Video games developed in Finland Single-player video games