Physics Games and Physics-Based Game Downloads

With the increased amount of comment chatter, I decided there’s enough justification to launch Fun-Motion Physics Games Forums. I do plan to replace the WordPress comments with integrated vBulletin comments as some point (the bridge plugin for it was misbehaving for me, but I’ll fix it when I have some time).

The forum is split into two sections: one for players, and one for developers. This is a great opportunity for physics game developers to get feedback for prototypes or complete projects from real users.

Of interest to many people will be the section for suggesting games. I populated it with a handful of upcoming reviews from my queue notes (make sure you read the sticky in that section if you’d like to suggest games).

As I have more time I’ll embellish the forum theme a bit. Right now it’s stock vB. Enjoy! Make sure you read the forum rules!

Just a quick heads up: Posts this week will be slow, or likely nonexistent, as I’m in Amsterdam for the Casuality casual games conference. I’ll be back into the swing of things next week!

(Rate this game! 118 votes, average: 3.47 out of 5)

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Have you ever wanted to swap out a clown’s cream pie with a metal replacement? That next performance would take a grisly–but hilarious–turn for the unexpected. Or, you could do away with the subterfuge altogether and simply lob metal pies at hapless clowns. That would be wrong, and possibly illegal, unless it was a totally awesome video game. Why look! It is!

The Old Version

I created a prototype of I Hate Clowns in the fall of 2003. It was a three-day project, and was seriously lacking in art production. I’ve already talked about the old version on Fun-Motion, so I won’t double up with my comments here. If you’re interested in some of the design aspects of the game be sure to give the old review a read.

New Art, New Code

So why create a completely new version of I Hate Clowns? I was in need of a simple game concept to use as a test bed for evaluating game engine technologies. You can learn a lot just by poking and prodding an engine, reading the docs and trying out individual features, but you learn a lot more if you bother to implement a complete game with new art, a GUI, level progression, and so on. Coincidentally, Over The Edge Entertainment was sponsoring a game development contest just as I began to evaluate Unity, OTEE’s technology. We only had two weeks before the deadline, so we needed something small. I decided that a new I Hate Clowns game would be a perfect fit with the amount of time we had.

The end result is the game you see here. A friend of mine and talented technical artist, Adam Mechtley, created the clown and environment over two weekends. The code only took a few days–I spent a lot more time breaking things and experimenting with various features in Unity. Although I joined the contest primarily as motivation for evaluating Unity, we actually took third place (scoring a free Unity license and video card in the process).

What Next?

One of the reasons I wanted to revisit I Hate Clowns is because the game is surprisingly addictive. I think there’s a lot of potential here for building a “real” game: add some variety in level pacing, different weapons, more interactive environments, and a simple point system to spend on upgrades and bonuses, etc. In my opinion the game is only a few development months away from being a commercially-viable indie title. We currently have it shelved as a potential project for 2007.

(I Hate Clowns: Operation Pie Gones Game Screenshots)

The Pie’s the Limit

For now, though, I Hate Clowns remains a simple prototype. At least this time around there’s all-new art and physics balancing to enjoy. And, hey, we’re giving the game away for free. What reason do you have not to mess up some clowns?

Download I Hate Clowns: Operation Pie Gones Game (13 MB, Windows)

Download Mac OS Version (19 MB, Universal Binary)

And if other developers are curious: We’re pretty happy with Unity. There are cons as well as pros, of course, but it does a lot of things really well. They have a free 30-day evaluation copy on their website if you’d like to try it out.