Step away from the computer!
Welcome to Mightier, the action puzzler that pulls you away from the
screen to solve puzzles by hand with pencil and paper.
Using a color printer and web camera, the game prints puzzle pages for
you to draw on, then captures the results when you're done.
From your drawings, Mightier constructs a landscape and characters for
a fun and engaging 3d platformer.
Drawing by hand is a lot more fun, but the game also supports mouse
drawing for those without a printer, webcam, or spare paper.
We developed Mightier in our spare time during the 6 months leading up to the 2009 IGF submission deadline.
Our goal was to create a game that involved interacting with something physical, that you could hold in your hand or carry with you away from the computer.
For Mightier, that means printing puzzles on paper, solving them by drawing on them, and then capturing the solution back into the game using a web camera.
We had grand ideas to utilize the printing and capturing tech for the bulk of our interface: all instructions, activities, gamestate, etc. In the end though, reality (along with the deafening chorus of a thousand inkjet printers and low-rent webcams) hit us with a swift jab. We eventually steered towards a more traditional action-puzzler and added an in-game drawing mode to make it more accessible.
The game is now available for free from here:
http://www.ratloop.com/mightierIf anyone gets a chance to try it out, I'd love some feedback. The die is pretty much cast on this game, but we plan to do some more stuff along these lines in the future if there's any kind of interest.