Tag: physics

Bokida
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If you don’t know about Bokida yet, it’s not too late

I have bizarrely fond memories of playing around with Bokida when it was first released back in 2013. Bizarre because, at the time, the game was only a limited prototype. But there was something about its openness and the toy-like expressions its world allowed. It gave you a vast white landscape with only a few landmarks to break it up—a trench and a temple-like structure, if I recall—but you could place colorful cubes, cut them up, and push the slices around to create a right old mess. It was like a properly physics-based take on Minecraft (2011) that invited you to delight in…
Radical Rockits
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Radical Rockits is out to make the jetpack fun again

Pity the poor jetpack, forever stuck at the dweeby-but-not-practical stage of technological development. Sure, the jetpack looked neat when Buck Rogers used one to zoom through the sky in a 1928 edition of the comic series Amazing Stories, but it’s basically all been downhill since then. In order to take off and even fleetingly maneuver, jetpacks have to be large and bulky, which is fine if all you want to do is take off and even fleetingly maneuver. But what if you want to look cool while doing it? Good luck with that; the jetpack is the Google Glass of aviation…
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Ragdoll humor takes flight in Piloteer, a physics game about jetpack dangers

Flying a jetpack is hard in Piloteer. Comically hard. That makes your goal of convincing the people of Piloteer’s world that jetpacks are cool and safe and fun even harder—you have to actually land without injuring yourself first. Even if successful, this more often than not includes plenty of flailing around in the air, doing unintentional backflips, and almost face planting into every available surface before even beginning to orient yourself mid-air. Piloteer debuted its humorous physics-based challenges first on iOS and Android, but it’s coming to PC, Mac, and Linux next. A new trailer reveals its desktop release date…
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Why is Rocket League’s jumping so much fun?

Rocket League is a game that is concerned with a great many things, but verisimilitude is most definitely not one of them. To wit, here’s an excerpt from Psyonix president Dave Hagewood’s excellent interview with Gamasutra about the game’s jumping mechanics: Designing Rocket League‘s rocket-boosting mechanic was an interesting process; because it was so much more emergent than other games that we’ve worked on. Usually, we start out with a very concrete plan of what you want to do, but in this case we really started out with just a very simple mechanic: cars that jump. We like cars that can…
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Vane strives for beauty and consistency, even in its bird physics

It’s the little things that makes Vane one of the most gorgeous looking games in development right now: the graceful twirl of leaves loosening from thin branches, clouds of dust that kick up behind a small, running figure, or the beating of a bird’s wings against the hot desert air. In games, beauty isn’t just the product of a pleasing art style. The coding has to do its part too, and a new blog post from developer Friend & Foe Games shows just how much painstaking detail can go into perfecting the systems that many people take for granted. According…
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This InnerSpace trailer is here to make sure you find tranquility today

Hey man, how’s your Wednesday going? Feeling good? Happy? At one with your inner soul and outer essence? Good, good. That’s good. Or, you know, maybe you’re not. Maybe you feel your center’s a bit shaky, and wish the ground seemed more stable—or at least more navigable. That’s totally chill too—absolutely no shame in that. They can’t all be good days, right. No matter how you’re feeling or where you are in life, we’re all just flying vessels trying to make it in this vast world of fragmented, drifting objects that are both repelled and attracted to one another. do…
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A game about American railway bridges collapsing isn’t as absurd as it seems

There’s a moment in every child’s life, when posing as an amateur builder, when they realize a simple but fundamental principle of design: things work better when you stagger them. In bricklaying, Lego or otherwise, the staggering of joints is called a running bond. In Mark Ellis: Train Bridge Inspector, it’s nonexistent. The game, a physics simulator rendered in a few different shades of brown, plays with this principle by letting locomotives loose across bridges held up by precarious arrangements of monochromatic blocks. At the start of each level, you choose whether or not to give a bridge the Mark…