We’ve been pretty excited for the release of Casey’s Contraptions ever since we posted the first trailer a couple of weeks ago. This colorful physics puzzler has you building up machines in order to collect lost items for young Casey across over 70 levels in the game. You can then take these collected items and use them in a level editor to create your own puzzles, sending them to friends via email for them to solve.
Another intriguing aspect to Casey’s Contraptions is the ability to share solution replays for each of the levels with friends on Game Center. Yesterday, the developers behind Casey’s Contraptions, Snappy Touch and Mystery Coconut Games, posted some new screens and information in our forums on how this system works (click any image below to enlarge).
This screenshot on the left shows one of the early levels in the game, where you must get down a soccer ball that is trapped on top of some pipes. Upon completing the level, you’re show the screen on the right, which tells you how many stars you earned on that level. Along the bottom of this screen are the 3 most recent solutions that your Game Center friends have shared, and clicking on one will allow you to see their final setup or even replay the level so you can see exactly how it worked.
You’ll notice that among the choices of replays there is one that has a Casey icon in the corner. Casey himself will actually be a friend to everyone in the game, and he wants to share his solutions to levels with you too. The screen above on the left is one of Casey’s solutions for earning 3 stars on that level. The way Casey goes about solving levels is often very direct with no frills, but the beauty of Casey’s Contraptions is that there are many ways to solve every level. The screen on the right shows the solution to the same level, once again earning 3 stars, but using a completely different tactic.
The ability to share solutions like this sounds like one of the most appealing aspects to Casey’s Contraptions. With the somewhat open-ended ability to create solutions to each level, I can see it being incredibly fun sharing a particularly crazy or elaborate solution for all your friends to see, and challenging them to try and one up it. Besides showing the 3 most recent friend solutions after completing a level, you can also expand this and see both your own solutions for that particular level plus all the shared solutions from your entire Game Center friends list.
Casey’s Contraptions is scheduled to launch this Thursday (or rather, Wednesday night in the US) for the iPad at a price of $2.99. An iPhone version is in the works as well, though no date is set for that at this time. You can drop by the upcoming thread in our forums for discussion of the game, and we’ll have a full review of Casey’s Contraptions when it launches later this week.
