The Incredible Machine 2 Game
Nayra Waddles
A new game by Jeff Tunnell, called Contraption Maker, is the spiritual successor to the Incredible Machine series. It was produced by Spotkin Games, a company founded by Jeff Tunnell, and features the same developers of the original Incredible Machine. The game was released through Steam for Windows and OS X on July 7, 2014.[3]
The general goal of the games is to create a series of Rube Goldberg devices: arrange a given collection of objects in a needlessly complex fashion so as to perform some simple task, such as "put the ball into a box" or "start a mixer and turn on a fan". Available objects range from simple ropes and pulleys to electrical generators, bowling balls, and even cats and mice to humans, most of which have specific interactions with or reactions to other objects: for example, mice will run towards nearby cheese, and light sources placed next to a magnifying glass will ignite wicks. Levels have a set of fixed objects that cannot be moved by the player, and the player must solve the puzzle by carefully arranging a provided set of objects around the fixed items. There is also a "freeform" option that allows the user to "play" with all the objects with no set goal or to also build their own puzzles with goals for other players to attempt to solve.
Notably, the games simulate not only the physical interactions between objects but also ambient effects like varying air pressure and gravity. The engine does not use a random number generator in its physics simulation, ensuring that the results for any given machine are deterministic.
The Incredible Machine 2 introduced new levels, an extended assortment of parts, a new interface, significantly improved graphics, sounds, and music, and two player hotseat play. It improved on the "freeform" mode, allowing players to create completely playable puzzles by defining not only the participating parts, but also the set of circumstances under which the puzzle will be considered "solved". In terms of gameplay, this version provided the biggest addition to the series, and subsequent updates were basically only ports of the game to newer operating systems with updated graphics/sounds and sometimes new puzzles, but no new parts.
Return of the Incredible Machine: Contraptions was released in 2000. As a full 32-bit Windows 95 game, it has new 800x600 resolution graphics.[5] Although it has a few new levels, the majority of them are levels from The Incredible Machine 2.[6]
Even More Contraptions (2001) started a service allowing players to share their homemade puzzles using a service called "WonSwap". Even More Contraptions also came with a Palm Pilot version of the game that contained its own unique set of parts and puzzles suited for a small screen.
Neil Harris reported in Computer Gaming World in 1994 that showing The Incredible Machine to an engineer friend caused "a chain reaction that brought productive work to a halt at a major naval yard".[17]
The Incredible Machine for iOS is the first version in the series to be developed and released by Disney for the AppStore. This revamped version contains new art, sounds, and levels, as well as a redesigned user interface. Disney released The Incredible Machine on June 8, 2011 at E3 in Los Angeles, CA. The app has been retired from the app store as a decision made by Disney.[23]
In 2013, Tunnell began the work on a new game, called Contraption Maker, which is billed as a "spiritual successor" to the Incredible Machine series. Kevin Ryan and Brian Hahn, the other two developers on the original game, worked on Contraption Maker as well, along with other developers at Spotkin, a video game development company started by Tunnell.[24][25][26]
Contraption Maker features improved "HD" graphics, and has a robust physics engine. The game features over 200 official puzzles and over 100 different parts. It also has Steam Workshop support, so users can create and share their own puzzles.[27][28]
The game was first released on Steam through its Early Access program on August 28, 2013.[29][30] Throughout its time in the program, Contraption Maker had 6 Alpha releases, adding features such as multiplayer and copy-and-paste, new parts, and new puzzles, followed by a Beta release in May 2014. The final (1.0) release was made in July the same year, and Contraption Maker left the Steam Early Access program.[3]
The Incredible Machine is a puzzle game where the player has to assemble a Rube Goldberg-type contraption to solve a simple puzzle.
The game consists of a series of puzzles, each having a simple objective, such as "put the baseball into the basket" or "turn on the fan". To achieve this, the player is given a number of parts such as: balls, girders, rope, balloons, seesaws, cats or monkeys, and his job is to arrange and connect them on the playfield, so that, upon clicking the "start puzzle" button, the whole contraption activates and achieves the objective.
For added difficulty, some puzzles have different gravity or air pressure from that of Earth.
There is also a freeform mode where the player is given an unlimited number of parts to construct a machine of his own invention. The machines created this way can be saved to disk.
Still, the machine-construction-set idea never left Tunnell, and, after founding Jeff Tunnell Productions in early 1992, he was convinced that now was finally the right time to see it through. At its heart, the game, which he would name The Incredible Machine, must be a physics simulator. Luckily, all those years Kevin Ryan had spent building all those vehicular simulators for Dynamix provided him with much of the coding expertise and even actual code that he would need to make it. Ryan had the basic engine working within a handful of months, whereupon Tunnell and anyone else who was interested could start pitching in to make the many puzzles that would be needed to turn a game engine into a game.
Note that we never made use of the three ramp pieces at our disposal. This is not unusual. Because each puzzle really is a dynamic physics simulation rather than a problem with a hard-coded solution, many of them have multiple solutions, some of which may never have been thought of by the designers. In this quality as well The Incredible Machine is, yet once more, similar to Lemmings.
The game includes many more parts than we had available to us in the first puzzle; there are some 45 of them in all, far more than any single puzzle could ever use. Even the physical environment itself eventually becomes a variable, as the later puzzles begin to mess with gravity and atmospheric pressure.
As for Incredible Machine, while Tunnell was the one who wanted to do a Goldberg machine style game, Ryan was the designer as well as the programmer. He did not cite any games as influences to me (though I was unaware of Creative Contraptions and did not ask about it specifically); he claims he went down to the library and looked at every book on Rube Goldberg devices he could and then created a design document based on his findings. The rest of the game was an iterative process as the engine was built, people came up with puzzle ideas, and then the objects were tweaked to better fit the puzzle ideas. The freeform building mode was a late addition when they realized that it would take almost no effort to clean up their puzzle editing tools to be usable by players.
I came here hoping someone would remember Creative Contraptions. I had the Apple 2 version. Its physical disk was art: matched to the blue of the screen background, engraved with a Rube Goldberg machine.
After all, if we are finding typos and statements that convey an unintended meaning, we are certinally devoting time and energy to reading the texts. We are getting something from it that keeps bringing us back, over years and hundreds of articles. So, to me, light editing really is a service that I can provide to help, not to bother or criticize.
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The past four months I've been in high school gyms all over the country, from Seattle to Massachusetts, New York to Huntsville. Each night, hours before the doors opened and hours after the final buzzer sounded, I interacted with individuals working together to ensure when the first ball bounced, every apparatus within the gym was functioning properly.
I made contact with janitors who stopped what they were doing to hang a 15 foot banner [and boy was it a challenge when a naive girl from Missouri brought duct tape to hang it], administrators who allowed me to ship boxes upon boxes to their office [by 5 boxes I really meant 10], to the OCD team moms who allowed me to take over their senior night ceremony [which has had the same ROS for 15+ years], the gym teachers who cancelled the mile to have their students assist in applying door decals [you're welcome students]. I won't forget about the cheerleaders who rolled 100's of t-shirts only to be worn by their peers hours later [team spirit, it's incredible to witness], and finally to the families roping off their cheering section hours before tipoff [seeing first hand the love and support for a son/grandson/cousin/uncle and his teammates was amazing].
To the athletes, families, administrators, and schools who allowed me to pose as one of your own for a night, thank you. Night in and night out, I was amazed at how schools who were so different, whether it be geographically, demographically, socio-economically, or by population size, all were comparable through the sport of basketball.
I gained family members I never knew I had this season. I gained knowledge I never thought would be possible by sitting in a basketball gym. And most importantly I witnessed a Incredible Machine working across so many communities, basketball programs, and educational systems.
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