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Found a bug with the game... or im on the final level and completed it. I have the puzzle with a speed of 60 and torque of 1. The required torque is 6. I have achieved the required torque through the use of 2 12 gears, 1 16 gear, and 1 24 gear. The puzzle presents the 8 gear as the driver. 12 is connected with an 8 joined on top. 16 is connected to the joined 8, and a 12 is joined to the 16 on top. the 12 is connected to the end, which is a 24. The final torque is exactly 6 and the door wont open.
3:40 "Sometimes, despite your best efforts, some mechanisms are just not going to work." A moment of silence for that unnamed artist who tried to create a deep and meaningful image; but ended up making a meme instead
i liked playing it, and also learned a little about the torque, but still, i couldn't finish it because of the controls. you have to switch between numbers just to delete stuff (which could be on the right click or something) and if you want to move something, you have to delete it all and rebuild it. this made the game turn into a switching between gears to see what fits simulator. (i also thought the requirement was exact so i spent too much time thinking about how to make 1 turn into 1.3)
The already mentioned minecraft mod "Create" works with shafts, cogs, etc, one interesting thing to consider is how they use belts; the main use of belts is to transport items from one point to another, but you can also use them to transport rotation
First game to come to mind was Cogs, a 2009 sliding puzzle game. You had these 3d machines with shiftable parts which usually had gears or pipes on them. Once you completed the puzzle it'd do some animation such as flying away.
Gears are cool. :D One game I'm playing currently is a Minecraft mod called Create. I have... so, so many gears reducing or speeding up in various places. I've heard it be called "gear gore" before and that's the term I'm going with.
The Professor Layton games have a few gear puzzles like you asked about in the beginning, but they're all simple "which way does the thing turn" puzzles. They find ways to make it more interesting, though -- the final puzzle of the second game is a gear puzzle where you have to place sets of gears on a grid so they all line up and turn the output in the right direction.
i was just gonna talk about this. generally these types of games have gear puzzles but they're simple since you have to work with the gears you have and the spots you have to put them. i never saw a puzzle like the one on the video where you actually need to think about the exact gear size and placement
I remember one of the first Humble Bundles contained a game about gears. It was called "Cogs". And was not that challenging in terms of gear ratio's like balancing forces or speeds. But it did have puzzles in terms of reversing direction's and mixing different physical sizes to reach your goal.
When you said game about gears, I immediately remembered a game from my childhood called >Crazy Machines< where you actually need to pair gears together to solve a puzzle
Very fun stuff! A few games I know of that used gears in puzzles was MySims Agents and MySims Kingdom, both for the Wii. Agents' gear puzzles were self-contained inside minigame menus that when solved would progress a task outside the minigame, while Kingdom's were actually hooking up machines, pumps, motors, and generators. Unfortunately neither of them took advantage of the torque change even though it seemed to be implemented. Both games snap components to a grid, 3D for Kingdom and 2D for Agents. The puzzles were essentially Pipe Mania style ones, with electric wires, fluid pipes, and mechanical gears that have unmovable inputs and outputs that needed connection with limited parts that you'd have to find in Agents, or make yourself with gathered resources in Kingdom. They were games aimed at a younger audience, the puzzles weren't generally too complicated, but were still fun and fit well in the games' designs.
A good game utalizing gears is Five Night at Freddy's help wanted or for short, fnaf help wanted. It's a horror experiance with robots that jumpscare you in vr. There is a level called Vent Repair that has a gear puzzle for you to solve. It's very fun scary, horrifying stressful and can be a little challenging to do first time. Though, i wish there we're more games like this indeed. Like an escape room but with cogs!
I had a game growing up for the GameBoy called "Gear Works". It was the first thing I thought of when you asked about puzzle games that use gears. I remember being fascinated with it and thought it was fun, hopefully worth checking out!
Minecraft's 'create' mod makes use of "cogs" aka gears as one of its primary features, and I played one cell phone escape room style game once that used gears for 1 single puzzle (sorry I can't remember the name now). Other than that, I am unaware of any gear-based game that uses real gear physics for actual gameplay.
reminds me of a game that used to be on the lego website, where you would open doors to climb up a tower, the basis of the game was that each room had a drive gear, a door opening gear, a time limit, some pre placed gears on a wall and an inventory of gears that the player could place I don't think they implemented any minimum torque requirements like yours though
Was pretty fun playing! Managed to get over 16k torque on lvl 10. I'm pretty sure I could go for more but the game wouldn't propagate speed under 0.1 hehe Subbed!
There was a limited event in Genshin called "Evermotion mechanical painting". It was a puzzle you have to solve using gears and I was amazed by its implementation of gear mechanics.
As a '90s kid, The Incredible Machine immediately comes to mind. Only direction matters though, AFAIR there's no torque or speed mechanics at all though, gears in TIM are either spinning or not.
Exactly! Searched the comments to not double, but TIM series comes to my mind the moment someone mentions gears and mechanical... machines. Well, TIM and nowadays Minecraft Create
I think "Incredible Machines Contraptions" had some gear puzzles some to get them moving and some requiring placing the right sized gear to change the speed of certain things
I've had added, with my team, a cogwheel puzzle feature to our Global Game Jam game a few years back. It used a circle collider to detect cogwheels overlapping. With this, we made sure the cogs overlapped in the empty spaces and rotate by their pivot at the correct speeds according to the line of cogwheels.
The Incredible Machine, it's successor Contraption Maker, and Crazy Machines are all rube goldberg puzzle games that have gears and can have gear puzzles. I made a gear puzzle for Contraption Maker! There's also this niche physics game called Lucifer's Atoms that has you build 3D mechanisms with different materials and it simulates gears in a 3D physics engine which I thought was impressive. I love physics games.
"The Incredible Machine" was an old PC game that had you solving puzzles with Rube Goldberg style contraptions. I always liked how they used gears, conveyor belts and pulleys in that one!
MySims Agents had a gear style game when you go to repair broken devices. You had two gear sizes to pick from (1x1 and 3x3), along with small, medium, and large belts, solar panels and wires, water pumps and pipes, light emitters and mirrors, etc.; the later puzzles were genuinely quite fun for what was otherwise a minigame and not actually the full game.
Hi Leonard! Nice project, thank you for sharing! I have experimented with variable radius gears and shared on this very platform, but can't say anything more without getting censored.
There was an old mobile game (2009) called Geared, where you had to use gears to transfer power to a goal gear. The gimic was the gears where physics objects and subject to gravity, so you had to pile them up and jam them against level geometry or they would just fall to the bottom. So puzzles would restrict where you could place them, so you had to carefully drop gears in the correct order to make the system work
Runescape elemental workshop quests are very elaborate puzzles involving moving towers in a grid in such a way to connect a bunch of gears together to power different parts on the workshop. It's pretty neat in theory but good GOD is it complicated.
There was a LEGO educational package that came with an array of LEGO Technic parts and required students to construct simple mechanical contraptions, (it was a little daunting being put on the spot when I was the only person in my class familiar with how a basic ratchet worked), you could probably lift a large amount from the array of parts the LEGO group has produced over the years, including a clutch gear which has a clutch strength of about 4 newtonmeters IIRC (even if it serves in part to stop motors from stalling and roasting).
Incidentally, just yesterday, a friend and I started a playthrough of a co-op puzzle game called "We Were Here Together", and one of the last puzzles we solved before we had to stop for the day was a lovely puzzle with gears! The gears slid around in a disconnected labyrinth and one player needed to manage where the gears were placed in order to drive the correct output gear, while the other player fed directions to the gear-solver based on how the gears were affecting their portion of the puzzle. It was just one very cool thing out of a list of very cool things in the game, and I'm looking forward to completing the playthrough.
We were here has a puzzle that uses gears. Great game series, highly recommend checking it out. Definitely nowhere near as complicated as your gear game, just simple fit the right gears into the right place to get the output.
the point-and-click game "Connections", based on the TV show hosted by James Burke, had a level where the player had to place cogs into a panel to make a giant clock work properly!
There was a little game back from i think 2002 called Cogs. Still one of my favourite games of all time. It definitely uses gears in an interesting way, but I don't think it really used the entire concept as much as it could. I guess you could put that down to technical and budget limitations though.
Many years ago there was a game in the Lego website where you had to guess where to put a cog to make a mechanism work and open a door to the next room
Actually in BotW there are some puzzles regarding gears where they aren't just decoration. And whats more fun is the fact, that you can for example jam the mechanism with random elements you put in between the gears.
There are segments of some veriaty puzzel games that make good use of gears as a puzzle mechanic (the room is a game that spring to mind in this case) but most of them are just an effort to transfer power from a to b and not actually making use of the rotational direction
I recommend The Room series. They've got a couple gear puzzles. On top of that, the Create Mod for Minecraft adds gears that make things very complicated. Admittedly, they don't always connect visually, but the dynamics are interesting.
This just needs a few supporting mechanics to be a really good game. And for a plot Im picturing a world inhabited by mostly steampunk style robots in an almost adventure time looking world. The gears youve been placing to open doors and complete different types of levels eventually powers some giant steampunk boss to fight
there was an oooold game we used to have on the computers at school called "gizmos and gadgets" and one of the puzzles was to turn a cog the right way using a bunch of other cogs.
I was a wii kid, and MySims Kingdom has a lot of mechanical puzzles where you need to hook up wires, gears, and plumbing. Probably not to your standards, but still interesting.
I do remember that Amnesia at least had a section where you had to put the right size gears in the right spot or the mechanism wouldn't work. But that's only a single puzzle.
i remember playing a mobile puzzle game a long time ago about placing gears it had zones where you couldnt place gears, and gears would actually fall from gravity if disconnected it was a fun game
I know a game like this, but for the life of me I cannot remember. you had to put gears together to reach different goals & have the things rotate the right way around, it was a pure gear puzzle game
Gears can be even more fun when combined with other mechanical elements such as cams and linkages with various degrees of freedom to achieve all sorts of programmable movement.
Heh, just came from a Real Civil Engineer video where he went through the early bits of "There is no game" which did, indeed, have a lock you needed to install a pair of gears in so you could rotate the handle and open the lock. (The rotation was unseen because you had to close the panel first, but they did mesh sensibly before that...)
Sm64 had TikTok clock. Where entering the level at certain times changed the way the gears moved. And I think some of the Castlevania games had gear puzzles.
Check out a game from way back in the 90s/00s called "The Incredible Machine" (there were several volumes). It was essentially 2D, but relied on all sorts of mechanical movements.
I imagine a good ending with the right speed and spin and a meh ending with a opposing spin and wrong speed. Like a spring snapping or a catapult that lets go slowly and the rock falls instead of fling and bashing down something.
i dont think this counts, but the Create minecraft mod is built around gear mechanics. it only has 2 sizes of gears, but i think it makes up for it with belts.
There's a small bit in fnaf vr that has a similar idea but it's only visual (match the size) with no torque or speed math. The closest I can think of is Minecrafts create mod but it's really simplified
There are a lot of games with mini-game puzzles like the first puzzle you showed of your game (at 5:20) but with a lot more gears. A good example is that gear puzzle in Uncharted 3, but there are more complex examples. Also this will completely ruin any chance of me being taken seriously but there's a mod for Minecraft called "Create!" where the whole point is that you have to generate rotational kinetic energy through various means (such as water wheels and windmills), then transfer that rotation through various mechanisms(mostly shafts and gears that you attach to said shafts) to power various contraptions(automated miners, moving/rotating platforms, automated crafting chains etc.). You also have to make sure the rotation direction is correct when you supply the power to the thing you want to power, because that changes how things behave (most notably that direction is what decides the direction a conveyor belt turns) There's only two gear sizes, one with twice the pegs of the other, but since it's a 3D world, you can do a lot with just two sizes. The large gear also works as a bevel gear when connected to another large gear at a 90° angle, which is unfortunately not as mathematically accurate, but it does add a lot of complexity what is possible. The speed and torque are also relevant, just like in this game, but the torque in Create! is more like your max capacity. The efficiency of the mechanism increases with speed (though there is a limit to it), but surpassing the torque limit of the original mechanism also makes the whole system stop functioning, and you end up having to add more connected power sources to increase torque.
I really love the game. The interaction with everything works really well. Maybe some inspirational ideas: * Quality of Life: - Interacting with any piece in a stack should be considered interacting with the top piece (or open slot) of that stack. - Right click should be utilized, e.g. removing the top piece of a "stack". * Some additions that would make the higher levels more interesting than just requiring more torque could be: - Coaxial bearings, allowing different spins on the "same axis". - Transmission from floor to wall and wall to ceiling by 90° (could be done, if all gears were secretly also bevel gears ;) ) - ... any other fancy gear stuff, as long as it stays true to being gears and not e.g. chains or thelike. * Some ideas regarding the optics: - Gears look so much cooler and are so much easier to distinguish, if they have different numbers of holes, e.g. the key assigned to them (3 holes for the smallest gear, 4 for the next larger, etc) Finally, this is not only *fun* to play, but above all educational, especially for children, and it is a non-violent game with a lot of real world implications. Why not make this a full fledged game, including a sandbox?
subscribed, liked, hit the bell, cast a goat into the *SHADER REALM* and im going to watch all of your videos 7 times these are the best videos relating to game development ive ever seen
There's a Minecraft mod called Create, it's a pretty robust tech mod, and the entire system is based on gears. The more torque you apply the faster your machines run, and you have to generate torque with waterwheels or windmills, you also have the logistical challenge of getting the torque your machines need from your generators to them through gears and connectors. It's all freeform so there's a lot of possibilities with it. Minecraft modpacks should really be more mainstream, aside from the "rlcraft" garbage that was trending a while back.
i fucking love gear puzzles in games! i think it started with the crazy machine games, but a lot of point and click adventures in the day had like gear and pipe puzzles, used to love doing those
From the top of my head, I can think of only one but I'm sure there's plenty, especially on mobile. The one I know about is the 2nd stage of the Glitched attraction.
I've now got a distinct memory of playing some satisfying simplistic Flash game where you placed gears next to each other. Doubt I'd be able to find out what it was.
genshin impact had this mini game in an event that you had to fit the gears in their right possitions to make all the gears turn. there where different sizes and heights you had to take into account to solve it
both lego technic and the room series have some amount of gear problem solving. The lego technic game on gears seems to have disappeared with the rest of many flash games.
Hey y'all, I now have a Patreon where I share the source code for every project, as well as bonus video content!
Check it out if you want here: www.patreon.com/UselessGameDev
The SAW games have puzzles with gears, but those are just for small segments, and those games are pretty... Eh.
Found a bug with the game... or im on the final level and completed it. I have the puzzle with a speed of 60 and torque of 1. The required torque is 6. I have achieved the required torque through the use of 2 12 gears, 1 16 gear, and 1 24 gear.
The puzzle presents the 8 gear as the driver. 12 is connected with an 8 joined on top. 16 is connected to the joined 8, and a 12 is joined to the 16 on top. the 12 is connected to the end, which is a 24. The final torque is exactly 6 and the door wont open.
@@Shadows_price ah, yes, it might be a rounding error, sorry about that
3:40 "Sometimes, despite your best efforts, some mechanisms are just not going to work."
A moment of silence for that unnamed artist who tried to create a deep and meaningful image; but ended up making a meme instead
A friend of mine spotted a similar one recently in the Parisian metro, so I guess those are still alive in 2023
@@uselessgamedev Big Chungus in real life?
what meme is that?
... and amusing Matt Parker. And all of us also!
😁
a very accurate meme
Just played the whole game and went from knowing nothing about gear reduction to understanding torque and teeth ratios. Great work!
If you wanted to make it slightly harder you could potentially change it from the minimum torque to the exact torque needed to open the doors
Great idea. That would fix the issue where the solution for level 12 fits all levels 9 to 12. I'm glad you enjoyed the game :)
i liked playing it, and also learned a little about the torque, but still, i couldn't finish it because of the controls. you have to switch between numbers just to delete stuff (which could be on the right click or something) and if you want to move something, you have to delete it all and rebuild it. this made the game turn into a switching between gears to see what fits simulator. (i also thought the requirement was exact so i spent too much time thinking about how to make 1 turn into 1.3)
Minecraft create mod 😮😮😮
My exact thought. Every game idea or concept I have can be boiled down into a Minecraft mod. 🤣 kinda sad actually
Now that I think about it, there was a somewhat obscure gear mod in Minecraft before create, It was in terrafirmapunk
Minecraft used to have gears before redstone. I think it was alpha or pre alpha tho
Embers had gears that worked almost identical to create cogwheels.
Create mod only has two different gear sizes. but yeah you’re right
The already mentioned minecraft mod "Create" works with shafts, cogs, etc, one interesting thing to consider is how they use belts; the main use of belts is to transport items from one point to another, but you can also use them to transport rotation
YES
First game to come to mind was Cogs, a 2009 sliding puzzle game. You had these 3d machines with shiftable parts which usually had gears or pipes on them. Once you completed the puzzle it'd do some animation such as flying away.
Gears are cool. :D
One game I'm playing currently is a Minecraft mod called Create.
I have... so, so many gears reducing or speeding up in various places.
I've heard it be called "gear gore" before and that's the term I'm going with.
The Professor Layton games have a few gear puzzles like you asked about in the beginning, but they're all simple "which way does the thing turn" puzzles. They find ways to make it more interesting, though -- the final puzzle of the second game is a gear puzzle where you have to place sets of gears on a grid so they all line up and turn the output in the right direction.
I remember the "The Room" puzzle game having gears in some of the puzzle that you had somewhat control over if you want to check that game out 👍😀
Ah thanks I'll check it out!
Came here to comment that, wholeheartedly recommend this game series !
Don't forget, there are gear puzzles in: The room 2, The room 3, and The room 4: old sins.
@@uselessgamedev Big Chungus in real life?
i was just gonna talk about this. generally these types of games have gear puzzles but they're simple since you have to work with the gears you have and the spots you have to put them. i never saw a puzzle like the one on the video where you actually need to think about the exact gear size and placement
I remember one of the first Humble Bundles contained a game about gears. It was called "Cogs". And was not that challenging in terms of gear ratio's like balancing forces or speeds. But it did have puzzles in terms of reversing direction's and mixing different physical sizes to reach your goal.
There's a great casual game called "Gearz" with a similar concept, plus make a chain to the end with the best score possible.
I was just about to comment about Cogs, but seems you already did! Glad to know that others know of it.
When you said game about gears, I immediately remembered a game from my childhood called >Crazy Machines<
where you actually need to pair gears together to solve a puzzle
Nice, thanks!
Very fun stuff!
A few games I know of that used gears in puzzles was MySims Agents and MySims Kingdom, both for the Wii. Agents' gear puzzles were self-contained inside minigame menus that when solved would progress a task outside the minigame, while Kingdom's were actually hooking up machines, pumps, motors, and generators. Unfortunately neither of them took advantage of the torque change even though it seemed to be implemented. Both games snap components to a grid, 3D for Kingdom and 2D for Agents.
The puzzles were essentially Pipe Mania style ones, with electric wires, fluid pipes, and mechanical gears that have unmovable inputs and outputs that needed connection with limited parts that you'd have to find in Agents, or make yourself with gathered resources in Kingdom. They were games aimed at a younger audience, the puzzles weren't generally too complicated, but were still fun and fit well in the games' designs.
Thanks! Sounds interesting, I'll check these out
@@uselessgamedev Big Chungus in real life?
A good game utalizing gears is Five Night at Freddy's help wanted or for short, fnaf help wanted. It's a horror experiance with robots that jumpscare you in vr. There is a level called Vent Repair that has a gear puzzle for you to solve. It's very fun scary, horrifying stressful and can be a little challenging to do first time. Though, i wish there we're more games like this indeed. Like an escape room but with cogs!
You should check out the Vent Repair Ennard level in FNAF VR: Help Wanted. It uses gears for a really awesome puzzle.
I had a game growing up for the GameBoy called "Gear Works". It was the first thing I thought of when you asked about puzzle games that use gears. I remember being fascinated with it and thought it was fun, hopefully worth checking out!
Minecraft's 'create' mod makes use of "cogs" aka gears as one of its primary features, and I played one cell phone escape room style game once that used gears for 1 single puzzle (sorry I can't remember the name now). Other than that, I am unaware of any gear-based game that uses real gear physics for actual gameplay.
An amazing gear-based puzzle game I used to play is Cogs, by Lazy 8
Minecraft mod named Create makes beautifull use of gears for actual automation
reminds me of a game that used to be on the lego website, where you would open doors to climb up a tower,
the basis of the game was that each room had a drive gear, a door opening gear, a time limit, some pre placed gears on a wall and an inventory of gears that the player could place
I don't think they implemented any minimum torque requirements like yours though
Was pretty fun playing! Managed to get over 16k torque on lvl 10. I'm pretty sure I could go for more but the game wouldn't propagate speed under 0.1 hehe
Subbed!
Thanks! Wow 16K is a lot
@@uselessgamedev Big Chungus in real life?
Very good video, it's amazing to see how you can transform an abstract idea into a game
Thank you!
@@uselessgamedev Big Chungus in real life?
There was a limited event in Genshin called "Evermotion mechanical painting". It was a puzzle you have to solve using gears and I was amazed by its implementation of gear mechanics.
Oh yeah I think I heard about that one. Genshin grows every day to become a more complex thing
As a '90s kid, The Incredible Machine immediately comes to mind. Only direction matters though, AFAIR there's no torque or speed mechanics at all though, gears in TIM are either spinning or not.
Exactly! Searched the comments to not double, but TIM series comes to my mind the moment someone mentions gears and mechanical... machines.
Well, TIM and nowadays Minecraft Create
I think "Incredible Machines Contraptions" had some gear puzzles some to get them moving and some requiring placing the right sized gear to change the speed of certain things
i love this idea, it would be so cool to see this system implemented into a factorio/satisfactory style industrial automation game.
I've had added, with my team, a cogwheel puzzle feature to our Global Game Jam game a few years back.
It used a circle collider to detect cogwheels overlapping. With this, we made sure the cogs overlapped in the empty spaces and rotate by their pivot at the correct speeds according to the line of cogwheels.
The Incredible Machine, it's successor Contraption Maker, and Crazy Machines are all rube goldberg puzzle games that have gears and can have gear puzzles. I made a gear puzzle for Contraption Maker!
There's also this niche physics game called Lucifer's Atoms that has you build 3D mechanisms with different materials and it simulates gears in a 3D physics engine which I thought was impressive. I love physics games.
"The Incredible Machine" was an old PC game that had you solving puzzles with Rube Goldberg style contraptions.
I always liked how they used gears, conveyor belts and pulleys in that one!
MySims Agents had a gear style game when you go to repair broken devices. You had two gear sizes to pick from (1x1 and 3x3), along with small, medium, and large belts, solar panels and wires, water pumps and pipes, light emitters and mirrors, etc.; the later puzzles were genuinely quite fun for what was otherwise a minigame and not actually the full game.
Agents was so good, I still dream of an Agents 2.
Hi Leonard! Nice project, thank you for sharing! I have experimented with variable radius gears and shared on this very platform, but can't say anything more without getting censored.
There was an old mobile game (2009) called Geared, where you had to use gears to transfer power to a goal gear. The gimic was the gears where physics objects and subject to gravity, so you had to pile them up and jam them against level geometry or they would just fall to the bottom. So puzzles would restrict where you could place them, so you had to carefully drop gears in the correct order to make the system work
Runescape elemental workshop quests are very elaborate puzzles involving moving towers in a grid in such a way to connect a bunch of gears together to power different parts on the workshop. It's pretty neat in theory but good GOD is it complicated.
There was a LEGO educational package that came with an array of LEGO Technic parts and required students to construct simple mechanical contraptions, (it was a little daunting being put on the spot when I was the only person in my class familiar with how a basic ratchet worked), you could probably lift a large amount from the array of parts the LEGO group has produced over the years, including a clutch gear which has a clutch strength of about 4 newtonmeters IIRC (even if it serves in part to stop motors from stalling and roasting).
Incidentally, just yesterday, a friend and I started a playthrough of a co-op puzzle game called "We Were Here Together", and one of the last puzzles we solved before we had to stop for the day was a lovely puzzle with gears!
The gears slid around in a disconnected labyrinth and one player needed to manage where the gears were placed in order to drive the correct output gear, while the other player fed directions to the gear-solver based on how the gears were affecting their portion of the puzzle.
It was just one very cool thing out of a list of very cool things in the game, and I'm looking forward to completing the playthrough.
We were here has a puzzle that uses gears. Great game series, highly recommend checking it out.
Definitely nowhere near as complicated as your gear game, just simple fit the right gears into the right place to get the output.
the point-and-click game "Connections", based on the TV show hosted by James Burke, had a level where the player had to place cogs into a panel to make a giant clock work properly!
I've heard about a game called Gears of War. Never played it, I assume it's about gears.
There was a little game back from i think 2002 called Cogs. Still one of my favourite games of all time. It definitely uses gears in an interesting way, but I don't think it really used the entire concept as much as it could. I guess you could put that down to technical and budget limitations though.
Besiege has gears, but because they use the rigidbody approach I think you can guess how that goes.
You can make gears in the Planet Centauri sandbox and enslave chickens to get mechanical energy for grinding wheat.
🐔⚙
Many years ago there was a game in the Lego website where you had to guess where to put a cog to make a mechanism work and open a door to the next room
Actually in BotW there are some puzzles regarding gears where they aren't just decoration. And whats more fun is the fact, that you can for example jam the mechanism with random elements you put in between the gears.
That's true!
@@uselessgamedev Big Chungus in real life?
This is a sick video. So glad it popped up
There are segments of some veriaty puzzel games that make good use of gears as a puzzle mechanic (the room is a game that spring to mind in this case) but most of them are just an effort to transfer power from a to b and not actually making use of the rotational direction
I recommend The Room series. They've got a couple gear puzzles.
On top of that, the Create Mod for Minecraft adds gears that make things very complicated. Admittedly, they don't always connect visually, but the dynamics are interesting.
This just needs a few supporting mechanics to be a really good game. And for a plot Im picturing a world inhabited by mostly steampunk style robots in an almost adventure time looking world. The gears youve been placing to open doors and complete different types of levels eventually powers some giant steampunk boss to fight
there was an oooold game we used to have on the computers at school called "gizmos and gadgets" and one of the puzzles was to turn a cog the right way using a bunch of other cogs.
I guess I thought of an older game: Gizmos & Gadgets is basically a series of mini-puzzles as a game. One of the puzzles I think was gearing ratios.
I love it!
I'm a big fan of puzzle games and this is very stratifying.
Thank you for your content.
I was a wii kid, and MySims Kingdom has a lot of mechanical puzzles where you need to hook up wires, gears, and plumbing. Probably not to your standards, but still interesting.
I do remember that Amnesia at least had a section where you had to put the right size gears in the right spot or the mechanism wouldn't work. But that's only a single puzzle.
If you want a game that does gears, there was that one starwars game where you built droids to complete missions. That one taught about gear ratios.
i remember playing a mobile puzzle game a long time ago about placing gears
it had zones where you couldnt place gears, and gears would actually fall from gravity if disconnected
it was a fun game
I know a game like this, but for the life of me I cannot remember. you had to put gears together to reach different goals & have the things rotate the right way around, it was a pure gear puzzle game
Gears can be even more fun when combined with other mechanical elements such as cams and linkages with various degrees of freedom to achieve all sorts of programmable movement.
I kind of wish that the game was downloadable and at a higher refresh rate, but I think this is a nice concept for a game. Good job!
I think I remember a game called crazy machines on steam
Heh, just came from a Real Civil Engineer video where he went through the early bits of "There is no game" which did, indeed, have a lock you needed to install a pair of gears in so you could rotate the handle and open the lock. (The rotation was unseen because you had to close the panel first, but they did mesh sensibly before that...)
Sm64 had TikTok clock. Where entering the level at certain times changed the way the gears moved. And I think some of the Castlevania games had gear puzzles.
Besiege is the only game I can think of. It is a great game.
Check out a game from way back in the 90s/00s called "The Incredible Machine" (there were several volumes). It was essentially 2D, but relied on all sorts of mechanical movements.
0:40 in the Java Edition Indev 0.31 there were gears instead of redstone
Maaaaan Ive discovered your channel from the Moebius shader and it is gooooooood as hell!
I can't believe you only have 19k subs!
Before the Moebius video I had 330 subs 😁 I'm glad you like the channel!
Bunch of flash games had useful gears and there was even a grey gear puzzler where you had to rotate them to come up with paths
There’s an old game called Cogs.
There’s also cog puzzles in We Were Here Together
There is the game Cogs, but it doesn't really have any gear ratio mechanics.
I shall check it out anyway, thanks!
But it doesn't seems to be available anymore
just checked and It's still on steam bit not on mobile
@@uselessgamedev Big Chungus in real life?
There's a puzzle in the remade version of RE2 where you need to match the correctly sized gears with correct sized holes
There's an older game on Steam called "Cogs" that's basically a sliding tile game that has rotating gears on the tiles.
I imagine a good ending with the right speed and spin and a meh ending with a opposing spin and wrong speed. Like a spring snapping or a catapult that lets go slowly and the rock falls instead of fling and bashing down something.
Now I want a puzzle game that makes players use and combine the 6 simple machines to solve puzzles.
i dont think this counts, but the Create minecraft mod is built around gear mechanics. it only has 2 sizes of gears, but i think it makes up for it with belts.
There's a small bit in fnaf vr that has a similar idea but it's only visual (match the size) with no torque or speed math. The closest I can think of is Minecrafts create mod but it's really simplified
My Sims kingdom on the Wii uses them as puzzle elements, they're kinda basic tho
There are a lot of games with mini-game puzzles like the first puzzle you showed of your game (at 5:20) but with a lot more gears.
A good example is that gear puzzle in Uncharted 3, but there are more complex examples.
Also this will completely ruin any chance of me being taken seriously but there's a mod for Minecraft called "Create!" where the whole point is that you have to generate rotational kinetic energy through various means (such as water wheels and windmills), then transfer that rotation through various mechanisms(mostly shafts and gears that you attach to said shafts) to power various contraptions(automated miners, moving/rotating platforms, automated crafting chains etc.). You also have to make sure the rotation direction is correct when you supply the power to the thing you want to power, because that changes how things behave (most notably that direction is what decides the direction a conveyor belt turns)
There's only two gear sizes, one with twice the pegs of the other, but since it's a 3D world, you can do a lot with just two sizes. The large gear also works as a bevel gear when connected to another large gear at a 90° angle, which is unfortunately not as mathematically accurate, but it does add a lot of complexity what is possible.
The speed and torque are also relevant, just like in this game, but the torque in Create! is more like your max capacity. The efficiency of the mechanism increases with speed (though there is a limit to it), but surpassing the torque limit of the original mechanism also makes the whole system stop functioning, and you end up having to add more connected power sources to increase torque.
If I remember correctly, one of the Professor Layton Nintendo DS games has some riddles with gears.
Minecraft has a mod called "Create" that adds actual functional gears and gear based machines, complete with stresses, speed, and ratios.
Gears of War?
There is a game called Cogs which is a puzzle game about rearranging gears and pipes.
I really love the game. The interaction with everything works really well. Maybe some inspirational ideas:
* Quality of Life:
- Interacting with any piece in a stack should be considered interacting with the top piece (or open slot) of that stack.
- Right click should be utilized, e.g. removing the top piece of a "stack".
* Some additions that would make the higher levels more interesting than just requiring more torque could be:
- Coaxial bearings, allowing different spins on the "same axis".
- Transmission from floor to wall and wall to ceiling by 90° (could be done, if all gears were secretly also bevel gears ;) )
- ... any other fancy gear stuff, as long as it stays true to being gears and not e.g. chains or thelike.
* Some ideas regarding the optics:
- Gears look so much cooler and are so much easier to distinguish, if they have different numbers of holes, e.g. the key assigned to them (3 holes for the smallest gear, 4 for the next larger, etc)
Finally, this is not only *fun* to play, but above all educational, especially for children, and it is a non-violent game with a lot of real world implications. Why not make this a full fledged game, including a sandbox?
Thank you for your suggestions! To be honest I'm almost certainly not revisiting this project in the future but they were interesting to read
@@uselessgamedev Big Chungus in real life?
MySims Kingdom, that has actual gear puzzles based on size, orientation, belt placement, etc
"Geared" was an iOS game with fairly complex gear puzzles. Not sure if it is still in circulation as I switched to Android years ago.
Great Breakdown and awesome commentary! Love the style keep up the great work!! 🤘
Thanks! Will do!
@@uselessgamedev Big Chungus in real life?
subscribed, liked, hit the bell, cast a goat into the *SHADER REALM* and im going to watch all of your videos 7 times
these are the best videos relating to game development ive ever seen
The Minecraft mod 'Create' comes to mind when thinking about gears in games
There's a Minecraft mod called Create, it's a pretty robust tech mod, and the entire system is based on gears. The more torque you apply the faster your machines run, and you have to generate torque with waterwheels or windmills, you also have the logistical challenge of getting the torque your machines need from your generators to them through gears and connectors. It's all freeform so there's a lot of possibilities with it.
Minecraft modpacks should really be more mainstream, aside from the "rlcraft" garbage that was trending a while back.
i fucking love gear puzzles in games!
i think it started with the crazy machine games, but a lot of point and click adventures in the day had like gear and pipe puzzles, used to love doing those
Old school runescape's Clock Tower quest LUL
Steam game called “cogs”
Logic Machines on the DS. It wasn't great, (or maybe I was bad at it,) but it makes rudimentary use of gear trains
Genshin Impact had a mini-game where this was used, with multiple 'levels' of gears, too.
I'm sure it's been done before more.
From the top of my head, I can think of only one but I'm sure there's plenty, especially on mobile. The one I know about is the 2nd stage of the Glitched attraction.
For a game that uses gear shapes, I would take a look at the game called Cogs by Lazy 8 studios. It sounds exactly like what you're looking for
there may have been a puzzle in the castle or the island of dr. brain (old ms dos games)
I've now got a distinct memory of playing some satisfying simplistic Flash game where you placed gears next to each other. Doubt I'd be able to find out what it was.
Yeah it's really sad the plethora of cool flash games has kind of been lost to history
genshin impact had this mini game in an event that you had to fit the gears in their right possitions to make all the gears turn. there where different sizes and heights you had to take into account to solve it
both lego technic and the room series have some amount of gear problem solving. The lego technic game on gears seems to have disappeared with the rest of many flash games.
The old Incredible machine games had gears along with all sorts of other mechanical devices
I believe Little Big Planet 1 or 2 had gears, though I can't recall if they were physics based
Amnesia the dark descent has a small section with a gear puzzle its not too in depth or anything but its there
Looks like you haven't played the 2009 game Cogs available on steam. Very clever use of gears.