Incredibots 2 Mini-Brawl
[Note: This contest has concluded. Scroll down to the bottom of the article to find the results.] Welcome to a new feature here at Jay is Games. If you've been visiting for a while, you've surely noticed that the site has grown and changed over time. Especially in the last year, we've attracted a ton of new readers, and along with them came new suggestions, new energy, and new JIG staff members. The site would not be what it is without you. You Are Games, every bit as much as Jay is.
I was initially attracted to JIG during one of the awesome Casual Gameplay Design Competitions, and while the next one of those is still a ways off, we wanted to give you another way to be creative and participate with us on a regular basis, beyond the usual comments and critiques of the daily games. You Are Games will change from week to week, but it will always be an opportunity for you to do stuff, whether it be a mini-competition about level design (like this week), a writing or art challenge, or a hunt for hidden flash game gems in a certain genre. We've got plenty of ideas, but we're going to play it by ear and see what happens.
That brings us to the Jay is Games Incredibots 2 Mini-Brawl!
We have mixed feelings about Incredibots 2, which Grubby Games recently released into Public Beta. Like the original Incredibots, it's one of the most versatile web applications around for creating physics-based robots and scenarios, and the sequel is easier to use than ever. You can now move pieces around in groups by just clicking and dragging with the mouse. You can adjust the gravity and many other variables that used to be constant.
However, Incredibots 2 doesn't include any official challenges, which were the center of the single-player experience in the first game. Instead, you are encouraged to create your own, and user-generated content being what it is, there is a wide range of quality available in the current line-up. This is the biggest change to Incredibots; it is now a big, friendly level design tool, with nearly endless possibilities. It's hard to recommend as a casual gameplay experience at this point, but for a brand new column about reader participation, it's just about perfect. Go go gadget level design contest!
Your mission for this Mini-Brawl is to create a challenge for your fellow JIGsters using the Incredibots 2 challenge editor. There are three restrictions:
- The Sandbox Size must be Small. The dialog box that pops up when you click the Challenge Editor button lets you select the size of your building arena, and to keep our designs tight, let's all use Small, the default size.
- The "Allow User Construction" box must be unchecked. That means the player of your challenge can't make their own robot; you have to supply both the robot and the obstacles. To find this checkbox, click on the "Restrictions" button in the upper right of the Challenge Editor screen.
- There must be at least one Win Condition. The "Set Conditions" button in the editor takes you to the win condition screen. There needs to be some sort of goal, so we players have something to strive for.
Everything else is fair game. Let your imagination run wild, and feel free to post your creations here in the comments for everyone to play.
If you wish to enter:
Please send a link to your challenge to the address on the right with the subject line "Incredibots 2 Mini-Brawl" and include your JIG display name (the name that appears when you comment here). To get the link to your challenge, play your challenge and click on the "Link to this Challenge" button in the control bar. The deadline is this Sunday evening, the 5th of July, at midnight, EST. The JIG staff will choose our favorites from the entries and post them here next week, and then maybe we'll have an audience vote too. Again, we're playing this by ear right now, and your feedback about our new feature is encouraged.
We're not sure what the prizes will be. This is mostly for the glory and the amusement. But there will be winners in the following three categories: Most Fun, Prettiest, and Best Use of JIG Mascot. That's the little guy doing a jig on the word "Gameplay" in our logo. Maybe someone will win all three categories! Anything is possible!
Feel free to discuss Incredibots 2 in the comments, and if you have ideas for other things we can do in the You Are Games column in the future, let's hear them. Also, extra-special thanks to Mat Annal of Nitrome for creating our lovely You Are Games banner. Cheers!
...And the results are in!
Winner: Most Fun "HeartBreaker Part 1" by Rydash (DarknessKeeper here on JIG).
Winner: Prettiest "minigolf" by qwertybacon.
Winner: Best Use of JIG Mascot "JIGMan Mouse Game v1" by Rydash.
And the other challenges (in the order received) were:
"JIGMan Parachute v1" by Rydash.
"Mars Rover Test" by jsq0228.
"JIG Sliding Puzzle" by BND.
"Portal HeartBreaker" by Rydash.
"JIGMan Parachute v2" by Rydash.
Because of the small number of entries, everybody who entered a challenge gets a six-month "Incredibots Supporter" membership, courtesy of Ryan Clark at Grubby Games!
The above links should work for most people, but if they aren't leading you to the contest entries, try searching for the titles of the challenges using the game's search function. It's located in the menu under File --> Load Challenge. Make sure the Sort Filter is set to "All Time", and be aware that the search function is case-sensitive. Grubby Games is aware some folks are having problems, but they haven't yet been able to track down the bug and fix it.
Congratulations to the winners, and thanks to everybody who participated!
Great idea! If any site can pull something like this off and actually have it become a thing, it's JIG. Way to take the next step!
YAY, I loved the original, and, although I probably won't participate, still nice showing this game on JIG.
This is good. This is VERY good! I will be sure to whip something up. :)
First of all, this is a great idea. That having been said, I have been waiting FOREVER for a review of Incredibots 2. Okay, 2 days, but it's been a LONG 2 days. Can someone PLEASE show me what that balloon animal in tutorial 9 is supposed to look like? No matter what I do, it looks nothing like a balloon animal and the tutorial won't continue. Maybe I'm just terrible at this, but SOME help, please, anybody?
This site is simply AWESOME!!
Say, is one able to submit multiple entries, if they are so able?
In alternate news, I forgot my JIG login thingy. I'm not really sure what to do in this case, so help there would be appreciated, too.
[Edit: Yes, multiple entries are allowed. And if you ever have an issue with your login, please use our "contact" email address to, um, contact us. :) -Jay]
OOOOOOHHHHHHH OOOOOOOHHHHH
Wow, I need to brush up on my Incredibots. I won a 6-month Supporter Membership for Incredibots 1 in their first contest (check out my rube, "Rubeness" wherever they've put those bots :D)
This should be fun :DDD
Oh wait, Rubeness is a replay, not a bot:
http://incredibots.com/?replayID=LSN495edae28aa020.88337040
(2nd highest-rated replay :O I didn't know it was that popular!)
One last question. Are we supposed to use the "Make Public" feature? Or are we to keep the challenges on our local computers?
Nevermind, it seems as though one NEEDS to save it publicly before getting a link to the challenge. Sorry, I'm a bit dense. :P
I've got a pretty good idea for this already. And LSN, you should start visiting the Incredibots forums again. :)
It's great that JIG is even more interactive!
Even if it will probably not win the three catagories mentioned, does a robot still have a chance of winning?
Jay, I'm happy to provide a 6-month "IncrediBots Supporter" membership to the 3 winners!
Awesome! Thanks, Ryan!
Sweet! We now have prizes! \o/
LSN, that is an amazing replay! No wonder you won.
Also, I have to say I'm amazed at the new banner that Mat has made. To be able to put so much detail into so few pixels, to be able to make a screenshot of a battle between Ryu and Ken in Street Fighter 2 with so much detail and make it so easily recognizable just blows my mind. Well done, Mat!
Baritoneguy: Nope. The big new thing here is the Challenge Editor, so I wanted to focus on that. You can transplant robots into challenges, though. Come up with something for your robot to do, and bang, you've got a contest entry!
ThemePark: I know, right? I was giddy when I saw the banner for the first time.
one of the guys in the banner had an error... lol
Great idea for a feature! Just make sure to include an Audience Award or something like that... Remember how the "Best of 2008" turned out? *shiver*
Well, a big part of the problem with Best of 2008 was how much we built up the audience voting in the first place. Here, I'm hoping to move from topic to topic rather quickly, so we'll just award some prizes and move on to the next thing. I'd rather have a small contest each week than a big one that sprawls out over a month.
However, we'll definitely link to all the eligible entries. I'm thinking that after we give out JIG staff prizes, we'll have an informal audience vote on the remaining entries, right in the comments, and the favorite will get another prize the following week.
Does that sound like a good way to handle it? Or should we delay the results by an additional week so we can announce the audience prize and the staff picks at the same time?
is it alright if we make a game for them to play, instead of a traditional challenge?
Gibel: As long as there's a win condition, that's fine.
Just to clarify that point, I've added it to the restrictions for the contest. Restriction #3: There must be at least one Win Condition. It was implied before, but not stated. Hopefully that doesn't spoil anybody's plans.
Currently there seems to be a problem with IB2. It won't load for me...
Also, I noticed that, while early on in the night, rotating joints were working properly, late when I brought up my game again, and had changed nothing, the joints refused to work.
Kind of hard to aim when you are in a fixed position. :P
I'm having a few problems with the game, for instance, when I try to turn on auto clockwise, it either won't work, or it goes only like forty five degrees. Considering problems like this are happening constantly, I feel I may not get to enter in the YaG competition.
Incredibots has a fantastic engine and I agree that the game setup just falls so much to what would be possible.
Looking at the default challenges this seems to be an enourmous Kindergarten over there. "credit me if you do something simliar", "rate 10 for making it copyable", and so on.
Also I don't understand the challenges doing. The great thing about incredibots was for the user to make a robot, why take that away? Its a questionable decision in my opinion. It should be a box the user makes a robot in to have it doing a challenge. When did it become to take that away from the games and make it mini a hugh series of mini-games who in my opinon all are rather very low quality, just comparing it to any flash game. Yes I know, its about the engine, but if you take that away from the user, it doesn't make much sense.
Long ramble short, make challenges with user creatable robots, otherwise you completly go against the idea that made that genre great. (like the fantastic contraption, now that was a great game!)
fuzzyface, you can still create challenges where the player has to make their own robot. Just place a build box in your level, and presto!
BND No look what is written: "That means the player of your challenge can't make their own robot; you have to supply both the robot and the obstacles."
I tried to make one little thing with this, "pong", I also take my point back the engine is good. Its not. It was a fricking pain. No way to resize things, random advertisment, options disabled (yes only 2$ to pay a month, heck I only wanted to make one challenge not pay again, and I don't care if you want to run a business or not), no elastic setting like in phun, and not even that fast moving objects just happen to shoot through solid object (seems to have no pathvector checking in motion). Oh yes, and every 20th try to go back to editor just hanged up to a gray screen removing my work. Nah, I know I shouldn't make that much negative posts, but I'm really not impressed.
fuzzyface: It's just for the JIG contest that you can't let the player make a robot. Other than that, you're free to make any kind of challenge you want.
The interface problems you describe are more troubling. The game is still in Beta, so some bugs are to be expected, but I'm sorry you're encountering so many problems.
Results are up! This article has been updated with the winners and all the other entries, and since only four people entered, they all get prizes!
We got one other entry, titled "Alpine Trail", that seems to be broken. Fluke421, if you send us a working version of your challenge, we'll get you a prize, too.
We'll try to figure out something a bit more inclusive for next time. It's a fair amount of work to make an Incredibots challenge, and technical difficulties seem to have scared a few people off as well. Onwards and upwards, and once again, thank you everybody who participated!
All of the links lead to incredibots :x
[They all lead to individual Incredibots challenges, yes. -Psychotronic]
As I've said
This "game" is too dang complicated and runs like molasses in January.
Strange to see Scientology advertised...
(I mean as an automatic commercial video, not in the game...)
I'd just like to give a special thanks to the members of the JIG chatroom who put up with me throughout the last week. You guys have a lot of patience for me. :P
Idea for the next one: 3 games are posted, but none of them have reviews. The competition is to write a review for any (or all) of the three, and the best review for each gets featured the following week.
What a coincidence, Fuzzyface. I too, was trying to make pong,i couldn't get the ball going fast enough until i remembered that you could just make the sliding joints repetitively move. I ran into alot of the problems you did. Oh well, the games here are great, I think i was over thinking things. Congratulations to all three of the winners =D.
I can't get Rydash's game to load. i just get a grey screen, with a progress bar that fills up and does nothing.
Are you talking about HeartBreaker Part 1, Gibel? It's working fine for me. Occasionally I'll load one of these challenges and the progress bar will load and then stop, like you're describing, but refreshing the page usually makes it work.
As I'm investigating the Incredibots forums, it appears the grey screen issue is not just an isolated incident. I'll try and help when I know more.
I may not have won, but at least I still get a free supportership! :D
"
All of the links lead to incredibots :x
[They all lead to individual Incredibots challenges, yes. -Psychotronic]"
Uh, no, they all lead to the main incredibots page. Try again.
Actually, wait, they all lead to an advertisement, then to a page with only a play button on it, then, when you hit the play button, to the main page. No one entered the contest so you provided fake links to run up ad revenue?
[Edit: Yeah, that's definitely what we did. *rolls eyes* -Jay]
I do not know too much more about the grey screen issue. All I can offer is to try another browser, or get the latest version of Flash Player.
In other news, I've created HeartBreaker Part 2. You can see the pretty version here: http://incredibots2.com/?challengeID=Rydash4a53d934e0bfa5.15185925
And the no outlines version here:
http://incredibots2.com/?challengeID=Rydash4a53d9a86adbc4.26368625
Actually, it was Jigman Mouse game.
All I can say is that that cool rube goldberg (good job by the way) entry near the top of the comments works just fine, but the rest not so much. If you weren't all defensive and sarcastic and maybe tried to fix the problem instead of blowing it off, then maybe I wouldn't have to be sarcastic in return. Derr, rolls eyes, derr.
tried logging in, still doesn't work, because it opens a new window where you aren't logged in. Just get ads.
fattywads:
The links are correct, and they lead to individual Incredibots 2 challenges. I'm not sure what else you want us to do. LSN's Rube Goldberg replay is from Incredibots 1, which isn't having the same technical problems as the sequel.
If you can't get to the challenges by doing the standard things, like trying another internet browser or updating Flash Player, you should contact Grubby Games and report them as bugs.
Gibel: I'm sorry you're having trouble. Incredibots 2 seems to be plagued with glitches right now. Like DarknessKeeper says, try another browser or update Flash Player. We've reported the issues to Grubby Games, and hopefully they'll get things worked out soon.
heartbreaker part 2 has a bug, where the final tower collapses on its own before you get to it.
That's not intended to be a tower. It's a mish mash of hearts, so one must use the tool in order to dig the right one into position.
If anyone is having trouble with ads when viewing these links to get to the games, you can try searching for the games under the "All Time" category.
Now, about the tower. I've made a bugfix with a retaining wall, as well as moved the supporting bars. Despite your earlier comments, thank you for bringing this to my attention.
I've added some information to the article about using the search function as a workaround. Thanks, DarknessKeeper.
Fattywads proposed the same thing, but I had to delete that comment due to swearing.
Grubby Games is aware that some people are having problems, but they haven't been able to replicate the problem. So for now, the game's search function is the best we can suggest.
Oh, right. Be aware that the search feature IS case sensitive. It's strange, yes.
:o darnit, I should have found time to do something.
Thanks all for the comments :)
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