You have to reallllly squint to see Incredible Machine in these. These are basic associations, not physical interactions. The closest you get to IM is "what happens if I stick these two things together" but it's more guessing and less input output.
In IM, you know what each thing does and see the output of each action, so you can iterate: placement, angle, special attributes like fire or light. It's not just stack two possibly related icons to see what you get. With these you either know the association exists or you're doing conceptual guesswork. There's no testing and iterating on a hypothesis, at a point once all known associations have been exhausted, iteration looks like permutation.
OH GOD THANK YOU!
I was playing this on a Packard Bell Windows '95 PC with integrated loud speakers and a mic. Super high tech for the time.
BUT: The German-language full version of that game had been pre-installed in the Start Menu (?!), so if you deleted the start menu entry by accident, you'd need to reinstall Windows to get that game back. Or at least, that was young me's solution to the problem.
Completely independently! We're a team of two University students funding this out of our own pockets. About 8 months work (on and off) from first prototype.
They're both inspired by Little Alchemy 1 & 2, PopCap's Alchemy, or if we really squint, The Incredible Machine from 1993.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Incredible_Machine
Come to think of it, LLMs with the right prompts would be pretty handy for a Scribblenauts clone: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scribblenauts
Probably outputting a format supporting the same characteristics as the Object Editor: https://scribblenauts.fandom.com/wiki/Object_editor
You have to reallllly squint to see Incredible Machine in these. These are basic associations, not physical interactions. The closest you get to IM is "what happens if I stick these two things together" but it's more guessing and less input output.
In IM, you know what each thing does and see the output of each action, so you can iterate: placement, angle, special attributes like fire or light. It's not just stack two possibly related icons to see what you get. With these you either know the association exists or you're doing conceptual guesswork. There's no testing and iterating on a hypothesis, at a point once all known associations have been exhausted, iteration looks like permutation.
Also "The Alchemy Game" from 1997.
https://archive.org/details/msdos_Alchemy_Game_The_1997
OH GOD THANK YOU! I was playing this on a Packard Bell Windows '95 PC with integrated loud speakers and a mic. Super high tech for the time.
BUT: The German-language full version of that game had been pre-installed in the Start Menu (?!), so if you deleted the start menu entry by accident, you'd need to reinstall Windows to get that game back. Or at least, that was young me's solution to the problem.
wow, I totally forgot, thanks! I remember playing that game or a derivative, I think on my father's 386 sometime around 1995?
[dead]
This idea is pretty common, I remember playing a similar game on my iPod Touch nearly 10 years ago
Maybe this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=caKj6rGEdyM. I was obsessed with this for about a week in high school.
Completely independently! We're a team of two University students funding this out of our own pockets. About 8 months work (on and off) from first prototype.
This idea is super old. There was a game like this that was popular like 10 years ago. This is a worse version.