Crayon Physics Deluxe Android

[Catherine Rubeo]

Theobjective is simple: guide a red ball to a yellow star. It's the way in which you get it there that's the crux of play. You have no direct control over the ball and are only capable of giving it a gentle push. Each level has a unique assortment of line drawings making up a basic landscape for you to fathom a way across. In many cases it's the yawning gaps between the hand-drawn protrusions that pose the greatest challenges.

Most titles use graphics to enhance gameplay, but here they're an integral part of the physics engine that gives the game its name. The touchscreen beautifully hosts the delicate, coloured lines that lend the game such wonderful style and the folded, faded paper background adds ambiance to the crudely-drawn levels. Neither does the reduced screen size have any real impact on the accessibility or visibility of those simple doodles, so the vital graphical element at the core of Crayon Physics Deluxe has been fully retained.

Good thing too, because the only tool at your disposal is a steady finger. Drawing on the screen creates a thin crayon line, which can be used to create any shape required to get your ball to its destination. Once drawn, the line (or shape, if you've rendered a crude circle or square) solidifies and becomes subject to the same weight, inertia, and gravity controlling the ball.

While some of the levels are quite perplexing, turning into awe-inspiring structures when solved appropriately, others aren't quite so challenging. At times you'll be utterly engrossed in the virtual machinery you're constructing to get the ball home, getting a sense of satisfaction from your own clever wax-based engineering skills. Other times, however, you'll feel as though you found a way around the problem by blind luck or a method the developer never intended.

Swinging a crayon-drawn club that happens to fall off its pivot point might still knock the ball into the star, despite the fact that you haven't solved anything or used the apparently necessary scenery to fathom the correct method. This isn't a particularly satisfying experience. In all likelihood, the game wasn't designed with any real method to its madness and solving the puzzles by any means is what the designer intended. Nonetheless, there's still a nagging disappointment when it's possible to circumvent rather than overcome a challenge.

But the sheer novelty value of seeing crayon doodles jump into existence on the page and roll, pull, knock over and build physical objects is quite priceless, so it's easy enough to forgive the less rewarding levels.

You draw objects, hinges, and ropes with your finger, and double-tap on an object to erase it. The controls are simple, but on a small screen it's easy to erase the wrong object and difficult to draw very small objects. The level selection offers no indication of which levels have been completed and no preview of the levels.

Parents need to know that Crayon Physics Deluxe is a hand-drawn physics puzzle game based on the award-winning indie PC game of the same name. The puzzles go from easy to extremely difficult, and later puzzles will not be appropriate for young children. There is no objectionable content, though. The controls can be a little tricky to use, especially on an iPhone or iPod touch -- the iPad's larger screen is easier to work with. Level selection is difficult since there is no preview for what you are selecting. The game is good at letting players learn by experimenting as they use their mind and creativity to construct objects that can help them within the environment of each puzzle.

CRAYON PHYSICS DELUXE is an outstanding physics-puzzler. Unlike many similar games that provide you with a limited set of tools, this game lets you draw any object you choose, including hinges and ropes, to help you get the ball through the environment to the exit star. However, this incredible freedom comes at a price: very difficult puzzles, like how to get the ball from a tiny floating platform to the star that is far away and much higher up. The game offers no hints, so it is up to the player to come up with clever solutions. The graphics are made to look like crayon on newsprint, and have a child-like feel to them, which belies the difficulty level.

On a small screen it can be easy to erase the wrong object, but the controls mostly work as designed. The level selection screen is poor, with just a row of numbers, no preview of the level selected, and no indication of whether you've completed the level already. With a better interface, and perhaps a lower price, this would be five star app.

The first of two indie classics on this list, Crayon Physics Deluxe might be five years old, but it has aged well. The crayon drawing aesthetic and free-form puzzle solving -- which allow students to draw objects into the level -- encourage students to use simple machines and conceptual physics creatively. One teacher has also used it to teach students the iterative process of design and engineering.

The second classic, World of Goo, garnered two different awards for design at the 2008 Independent Games Festival (Crayon Physics won the Grand Prize). In World of Goo, players build structures out of the titular black goo. As structures climb higher, or bridge gaps, students start thinking about weight distribution, gravity, and center of mass.

Roller coasters have long been a favorite example for physics teachers. They're a great way to show students the practical implications of concepts like velocity and kinetic and potential energy. Coaster Crafter features a few different modes that will take students step by step through the process of designing coasters, connecting each step and challenge to important physics concepts. The mode that has students fix broken tracks was a particular favorite of a physics teacher.

A follow-up to Angry Birds by developer Rovio, Amazing Alex takes inspiration from Crayon Physics' template, but instead of drawing solutions, players combine 35 different interactive, household objects like scissors, tennis balls, and rope to make Rube Goldberg like contraptions. It's polished and captures the quirk of DIY culture in a way sure to grab the attention of students that like to get their hands dirty. Students are also encouraged to keep trying, helping them, as one teacher points out, learn perseverance.

Tinkerbox is similar to Amazing Alex, but with an industrial vs. cartoonish art style. As a result, it still teaches many of the same concepts, but its thematic focus is more on machinery and engineering than homebrew creation. Like Amazing Alex, one of the best features of Tinkerbox is its level creator tool where students can build contraptions or puzzles and share them with others. It's a handy alternative for teachers who are looking to broaden their assessment strategies. As one teacher argues, tools like Tinkerbox can "be as valuable as even the best of lectures."

All the above games have physics in common but they're also all in 2D. If students love these games, consider challenging them with 3D and even 4D games that put physics knowledge to the test. Valve's Portal series is a great choice, or look into the equally mind-bending first-person games Antichamber or Quantum Conundrum, both of which go beyond the boundaries of Newtonian physics and Euclidean geometry.

Remember that children's book, Harold and the Purple Crayon? This is essentially that book made into a game, minus the toddler, and plus a lot of physics elements. Crayon Physics Deluxe has been making fans on the PC and iOS for years, and yesterday it finally hit the Play Store (after slumming it on the Galaxy Note 10.1 for a few months). The objective is to roll a 2D ball over a star, but that's like saying the point of baseball is to hit a ball with a stick: There's a lot more to it.

First, there's the graphics. They're nothing spectacular, but Crayon Physics really does look just like a kid's drawing on worn-out paper. Some nifty texture work makes even your crayon strokes look true to life. What's made the game so popular is its open-ended nature: you're encouraged to move that ball by drawing objects that affect the 2D world upon completion. This is easier said than done, especially in the later stages: elaborate Goldberg devices or a combination of in-game items will be needed to reach the goal.

Draw a small circle inside your creation and it becomes an axel. Draw a large circle on a line, and it becomes a weight. Hinges, ropes, and other simple machines are at your disposal. It's nothing short of an exercise in creative problem-solving. Check out the video of the PC version below for a rough idea of how all this works:

Crayon Physics Deluxe is a $2.99 download for devices running Android 2.2 and higher. By the way, don't be miffed that we're getting this game so much later than iOS users: it's a solid four dollars cheaper on Android.

Up until now, Crayon Physics Deluxe was only available on the Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1, iOS, and the PC, but it just landed in the Play Store for any Android device 2.2 or higher. This one is a 2D physics puzzle game. Imagine if your drawings could be magically transformed into real objects. That's exactly what Crayon Physics is all about. You will use your S Pen, stylus, or finger to replicate a crayon to guide a red ball to touch a yellow star. You do this by drawing the solution. You might draw a bridge, a ramp, or even a pulley system. It is your artistic vision that will solve the puzzles.

This open source icon is named "crayon physics deluxe" and is licensed under the open source GPL v2 license. It's a colored icon. It's available to be downloaded in SVG and PNG formats (available in 256, 512, 1024 and 2048 PNG sizes).

It's part of the icon set "Ardis Icon Theme", which has 1,161 icons in it.

If you need this icon available in another format, it should be pretty straight forward to download it as an SVG image file, and then import it into apps like Adobe XD, Crello, Figma or PicMonkey. Converting it to an ICO, JPEG or WebP image format or file type should also be pretty simple (we hope to add that feature to Iconduck soon).

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