Fantastic Distraction

My friend Greg sent me a link to the game: Fantastic Contraption (http://www.fantasticcontraption.com). It is a 2 dimensional ‘ant-farm’ world with a physics engine and 5 different pieces to make what you might think of as ‘robots’. You have a work area where you decide how many of each piece to use and attach them together. There is a ‘puck’ in your work area which you must transfer to a goal area. As soon as the ‘puck’ is completely within the goal area, you have solved that level. There are no points and no score. You have either successfully finished a level or you have not.
Here is a contraption that you might think would work, but it gets stuck. (Same as picture above.)
This game sucked me in like nothing else in years! The free game has 20 levels, and runs in a browser. You can save your levels and you get a URL so you can find them again.
What really takes time is the multiple iterations of the modify/test loop. Especially as your machines get more complicated, making changes frequently doesn’t quite change the outcome like you might expect, so then you change it again and run it again. And again. And again.
I think this game was made by someone who has full knowledge of my psyche and what it finds most intriguing/addictive/etc. I have stayed up all night a couple of times already (until the sky started getting light!) Fortunately for me, I have finished the 20 levels. Then I optimized for fewest pieces. So, I’m pretty much done. Unless I do some more optimizing on the 2 or 3 levels where it might be possible to further reduce the number of pieces.
Let’s just say that there is no way I will pay the tiny $10 fee to buy the full game. I wouldn’t come out of my house for a year, maybe never. With the full game you get more levels, of course. You can also build your own levels and share them with friends. Etcetera. Yeah, right. If I bought that game, I wouldn’t ever have any more friends!
To me, optimizing each level to succeed with as few pieces as possible was the obvious thing to do. I mean, after you succeed with some complicated contraption, can you make a simpler one and still succeed? After you look at this game, you may be amazed to learn that you can do at least 18 of the 20 levels with 10 pieces or fewer. It’s true.
Regardless, it’s been tons of fun!