Phun

One thing I enjoy is looking through the myriad of little flash games you can find on newgrounds/albinoblacksheep/etc. So many little ideas condensed into their simplest form to fit into the system requirements of a downloadable flash object.

Something I found today though was a slightly different beast. It was only a youtube demo of the program, but the idea it showed had some interesting game potential. It is called "Phun", from Umeå University. It isn't a game exactly, more of a sandbox. A physics sandbox to be exact. It is a bit like those 'animator vs animated' shorts except interactive and real time. You draw stuff, the laws of physics apply to the objects, stuff happens. Quite sophisticated actually.. I would love to poke through and see how they made it work.

But on to the game angle. Watching the examples I couldn't help think about the game potential of such an engine. Sure there are lots of physics engines out there, many of them capable of far more complex things. But this was was geared twoards the player interacting with the engine rather then the artist+programmer. This has all sorts of potential for problem solving games.

The example that came to mind was the simple artillery game (a favorite of mine). But in this case not only would you have to aim and such, but actually build the mechanism from primitives. Or a racing game where you have to design the car. Lots of potential there ^_^