Contraption Maker
^{The Incredible Machine HD}

12/28/2016

	Title	Contraption Maker
	Developer	Spotkin
	Publisher	N/A
	Relase Year	2014
	Platforms	Windows, Mac, and Windows PC
	Review Platform	Linux PC

     About a month ago I got an itch to play a game I hadn't played since I was about eight years old, that game being The Incredible Machine: Contraptions. I tracked down a copy and loaded it up on my old Windows 2000 machine, After playing it for about half an hour, I came to realize that it had aged horribly, not in terms of the core concept, or the game's design, or even graphics. The physics on the other hand were so clunky and dated, that I gave up out of frustration before even finishing the first set of puzzles. The most frustrating thing by far being that balls would loose momentum while rolling downhill if the slope was too shallow, often coming to a dead stop just before reaching the bottom.
     After giving up I still wanted to play a 2D physics based puzzle game, and after doing some digging I came across Contraption Maker, a spiritual successor to The Incredible Machine games developed by Spotkin, the studio founded by the original designers of The Incerdible Machine games.

Gameplay:

     Contraption Maker is effectively just a modernized remake of the Incredible Machine, and if you've played any of those games before then you pretty much know what to expect. The gameplay centers around building Rube Goldberg machines out of a variety of parts ranging from brick walls to anit-gravity pads, and setting them in motion. The main puzzle mode has players completing partially built machines with a limited selection of parts, and is the primary draw of the game for me. The puzzles start out incredibly simple with obvious soultions that involve pacing a few missing peices and only have one solution, but become more difficult as the game progressess. My favorite puzzles are the ones from about the middle of the game onward, where only a few peices of the contraption are on the baord and you have a large selection of parts at your disposal, resulting in multiple solutions. I like to make it a personal challenge to use as few componets as possible on those puzzles. There's also a feature where after completing a puzzle, the soultion can be recoreded and saved as a webm video for online sharing. I've embeded a few of these below becuause I think they illustrate the game's concept well.

           

     In addition to the puzzles, there's also a sandbox mode where all the parts are available, and you're free to build whatever you want. I recall playing the sandbox mode in the Incredible Machine a lot as a kid, but I didn't spend much time with it in Contraption Maker, and that's because of Maker Lab, which is the built-in level editor that allows for the creation of custom puzzles that can be shared online. The basic contraption building tools in Maker Lab are the same as those in sandbox mode, but they're expand on so much that it feels almost like a tool right out of a professional SDK. There's a layer system similar to Photoshop for organizing scenery, a copy/paste function that works on whole groups of parts and can move them between contraptions, and there's even a script editor to add and change behaviors of objects. Maker Lab is easily the most advanced built-in level editor I've seen in a game, and I was quite impressed with it, dispite not spending nearly as much time with it as I did the puzzle mode.
     My biggest issue with Contraption Maker is the timing of the animation when the contraption is put into motion. The whole appeal of watching a Rube Goldberg machine is seeing all the components trigger one after the other, but the way some of the animation in Contraption Maker is timed when something is triggered by something else it starts immediately, often before the first thing has had a chance to finish what it was doing. This can lead to confusion as to what's causing what to happen without multiple replays. There were even a few puzzles that has so much going on that I solved them by accident while just trying to figure out how the parts in one little corner interacted. I think some slight delays in the reactions and a few more frames of animation would have gone a long way. Outside of that, the only gameplay issue I encountered was the placement of the start/stop button for running contraptions. It's right next to the button to the change speed button, which I'd often hit instead, causing the contraption to speed up when I didn't want it to.

           

Technical Shit:

     Contraption Maker runs well and has minimal technical issues on PC. I encountered two crashes to desktop while playing, and both times the game crashed when I tried to pace a gear on top of another gear, and while that shouldn't happen, it was infrequent enough that I don't really consider it to be a major issue. I do have a bit of an issue with the video recording feature though. Those of you reading this who have an eye for framerate may have noticed that the video clips on this page are playing at 30 frames per second, despite the fact that the game itself runs at 60. That's because 30 FPS is the highest framerate that Contraption Maker can render videos at. I don't get this, yes it would take longer to render at 60 FPS than 30, but this is a PC game, and most PC gamers I know consider 60 FPS to be the bare minimum in terms of framerate. That's not to mention the fact that there's an option to upload recoded videos directly to YouTube, which has supported 60 FPS video for some time now, and there's already an option to change the video framerate in the settings. The choice not to include the option to record video at 60 FPS or higher just seems short-sighted to me.

Wrap Up:

     Contraption Maker largely succeeds at being a spiritual successor to the old Incredible Machine games by keeping the core gameplay of it's predecessors in tact while also expanding and improving on it in ways that weren't possible when those games were made. Most of the issues I have with it are minor nitpicks and I'm surprised it hasn't gotten more attention than it has. The only reason I even found out that this game exists is because I went looking for a game almost exactly like it, I haven't seen Contraption Maker so much as mentioned anywhere online outside of the research I've done for this review. If you're a fan of the Incredible Machine, or you like the idea of playing with virtual Rube Goldberg machines, you can't go too wrong with Contraption Maker.

Final Ratings:

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