Geary Grinder by Abregado
A seemingly physics driven puzzle game. Spin the goal machines at the correct speed to move to the next level. You only have three tools at your disposal, gears, belt drives and splitters. Figure out all the ratios perfectly and YOU WIN!
We thought of some ideas which fit the theme, but did not really feel constrained by it (something a good theme should have). The big problem is that we both (wheybags and abregado) work on a factory simulation game as our day jobs and really, really just wanted to do something mechanical.
Controls:
- Left Mouse to select and do stuff
- Mouse Wheel to change size of gear
- Right mouse to cancel and delete
- Up/Down arrows to move the camera
Hints/Stuck?:
- If you go from a large gear to a small gear directly, the speed will increase.
- If you go from a small gear to a large gear directly, the speed will decrease.
- To connect a new gear directly to an existing one, use the gear tool and click on the existing one.
- If you connect two gears with a belt, the speed will not change.
- You cant connect gears by placing them next to each other, try using a belt instead.
- There is NOT something missing from the third level.
- If you don't know how something works, read the tooltips.
Development Info:
Framework: Love2d Language: Lua Sound Process: Logic Pro, various synth patches and processed, recorded sound from guitar and kazoo. Other software: Inkscape
What worked:
- wheybags and I work together professionally, and we used similar tools to what we use at work, so most things went very smoothly.
- We came up with three ideas and picked the best one. The choice was obvious, because we kept talking about it for much longer than the others.
What didn't work:
- Getting to day 2 and realizing that we don't really understand how gears work in real life.
- I need to brush up on my vector math (stay in school kids!)
- Scheduling conflicts meant we had to interrupt work: plan ahead better!
Team:
- Programming, Design: Tom Mason (wheybags)
- Programming, Design: Ben Buckton (abregado)
- Music: Samuel Hollywood-Summers
Ratings
| Overall | 260th | 3.764⭐ | 38🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 244th | 3.667⭐ | 38🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 149th | 3.819⭐ | 38🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 956th | 2.714⭐ | 37🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 510th | 3.597⭐ | 38🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 277th | 3.542⭐ | 38🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 778th | 2.227⭐ | 24🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 495th | 3.406⭐ | 34🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 32🗳️ | 32🗨️ |
It would be nice to give a little explanation for how gears work for those of us who are less mechanically savvy, but it is not too difficult to figure out by playing around with the options you provide.
> the 4th level felt like a strange place to end
Yup, we wanted to add more levels, but ran out of time :(
> the up/down controls felt pretty clunky
Yes, we wanted to have the camera zoom up when you finished a level, but forcing you to do it makes sure you understand you can move back down again. You could actually move with the arrow keys too. A good addition would have been scroll wheel to move, perhaps
The music is pleasant.
https://www.twitch.tv/videos/492122688
Would be cool if you could connect multiple gears to a single gear. Also it seems a bit odd to me that the splitter divides the speed of the input gear between the two output gears but that's probably just me.
None the less though I really enjoyed the game. Great job!
It would also be nice to see how fast gears are spinning maybe when hovering over? A preview of the speed any newly connected gears would be would also be nice so that you don't have to build it, connect it, see if it's the right speed, delete it, repeat.
This is a really cool idea, and the music and presentation is great. It just feels like it won't let me to the things I need to do to solve the level. Oh and it hard-crashed before I could beat level 2.
Some notes from me:
* It'd be nice to be able to connect more than 1/2 gears to a gear.
* Rotating splitters would save a lot of headache creating chains of 2-size gears to move the outputs.
* Belts should be able to cross each other.
* You should be able to connect the goal gears to other gears and not just belts.
Very, very nice.
Very neat game. I liked the twist on level 3, and the game ended at about the same time as I realized I can daisy-chain belted 2x2 gears to cheese it :D
Still cool game. Also, I'm enjoying 0.17
From what I can tell, it's an internal engine crash that happens every now and again inside love2d, if it was our code crashing it should show an error.
@joeshanahan
>It would also be nice to see how fast gears are spinning maybe when hovering over?
Did you try doing that? Because it already does :p
The music was a bit too creepy for my taste and I would have loved to have a bit more space, espacially in the earlier levels (it's definetly ok to have space as a constraint in level 4, but in level 2 i was still figuring out the mechanics)
It also took me a while to understand that belts cannot cross. Highlighting pieces that prevent the placement of new pieces could make this more clear.
@markus That's a really good idea!
On the 3rd playthrough I tried to get as fast a speed as possible, 2.7235902753284*10^15, (I don’t know what unit, but if speed 5 equals 1.2 rpm, this would be deadly. Taking a gear of 1 cm radius, this is like 20000 times the speed of light.)
Error
libs/HC/polygon.lua:145: Need at least 3 non collinear points to build polygon (got 0)
Traceback
[C]: in function 'assert'
libs/HC/polygon.lua:145: in function 'construct'
libs/HC/class.lua:77: in function 'instance'
libs/HC/shapes.lua:438: in function 'newPolygonShape'
libs/HC/init.lua:86: in function 'rectangle'
collisions.lua:86: in function 'add_belt_to_collider'
collisions.lua:136: in function 'collide_belt_with_state'
gear_placement.lua:153: in function 'valid_belt_preview_placement'
gear_placement.lua:258: in function 'draw_belt_tool_overlay'
gear_placement.lua:401: in function 'draw'
main.lua:106: in function 'draw'
[C]: in function 'xpcall'
PS, I had just filled the playable area (after unlocking it all) with increasingly fast gears (to see how fast I could make them go, of course) and was placing a gear in the last little edge of space at the top when I guess I broke the game (same error as the person above me). Oh well.
Moving the camera view up/down with the scroll wheel would have been a small convenience (as well as auto-moving up when clicking the next level button). Would maybe have been neat if the levels were connected together, so later gears would move just from the one at the very beginning.
Edit: Spoke too soon, after finishing level 2, then I scrolled up and noticed that level 3 didn't have an input gear of its own. Well played! ;) Almost feels like cheating that you can just stack several small gears after each other to get to the other side of a belt (since you can't cross two belts).