A couple weeks ago, the Good Morning Silicon Valley newsletter posted a link to a story on Slate (with a devastatingly effective demo on YouTube) of Crayon Physics Deluxe:
Petri Puro, the developer, put it together by himself (it bears similarities to some other gravity-based physics demos/games) and won the “Seamus McNally Grand Prize — the indie-game equivalent of the Academy Award for best picture”* — at the recent Game Developers Conference in San Francisco.
I downloaded the prototype game Puro wrote, Crayon Physics**, and was blown away by it. So was my son, and we ended up fighting over the mouse to solve the last two levels.
Wow! Crayon Physics is just too much fun to describe (stop now and watch that YouTube demo). OK, Slate comes close: “an ingenious game that looks like it was designed by a third-grader.” I immediately wrote Petri Puro and begged him to consider porting Crayon Physics Deluxe to the Nokia internet tablet.
My real thought was “Too bad that Tim Samoff already gave that gift N810 away!” I know that once Petri got an internet tablet in his hands he would realize that the tablet and his game are meant for each other.
Then a thread was started here in the ITT forums about the game — I want this game on my N800!. I’m not the only one who sees the need.
Maybe somebody in the Nokia food chain will realize the same thing when they see Crayon Physics Deluxe demoed and send Petri a tablet.
in the meantime, I’m going to suggest that everyone who thinks likewise write to Petri and to anyone they know at Nokia and tell them the same thing: Crayon Physics and internet tablets belong together.
Let’s send Petri a tablet!
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* To quote Chris Baker’s original Slate piece.
** Following the precepts of the Experimental Gameplay Project, namely that the game encompass a single theme (i.e., “gravity,” “vegetation,” “swarms,” etc), be written by a single person, and be completed within one week.
Added later:
Visitors to Petri Puho’s blog at Kloonigames can see his other games — he writes one a month and posts them there — and learn a little about this 24-year-old: “At the moment I’m a student at Helsinki Polytechnic, studying computer science. Game development has been a hobby of mine for at least ten years now. My gaming interests don’t just limit to video games, but also include pen & paper roleplaying games, strategy games, board games, card games, etc.”
Chris Baker, in his Slate piece, notes that “despite his obvious talent, Purho isn’t sure he wants to go into the industry after he gets his computer-science degree. ‘It’s more about writing documents than it is about designing games,’ he says. ‘And I really hate writing documents.’” And Baker adds that “Purho will probably have a better chance of moving the industry forward if he keeps flying solo.”
I think that’s probably true. Now why does that seem so obvious? You see, I’m not the only one who agrees. To further Petri’s opportunities, an anonymous benefactor has indicated his intention to donate a now-idle N800 (yes, made superfluous by his recently acquiring an N810) to Petri. Shipping to Finland to occur posthaste. Games, inspiration and possible port to NIT to follow.
