GearBlocks is an open ended sandbox game for mechanically minded builders.
You can build a car with rack and pinion steering and a working drive-train with a differential gear. Or you could make a run-and-jump parkour course with motorised bouncy platforms, or an unstoppable walking mechanical elephant. The only limit is your imagination...and physics.
Create
Build or repair your creations anywhere on the map. Snap parts together, resize them, change their materials, paint them, and link their behaviours together. Choose from over 200 parts, including functional mechanical elements such as motors, gears, pulleys, joints, springs, actuators, and much more.
Interact
Turn, grab and shove your machines and watch the parts physically interact. Jump into the driver's seat and put your vehicles through their paces. Crash and smash your constructions to smithereens.
Improve
Learn how to build with the in-game tutorial scenario. Explore the example constructions to see how they’re put together. Test your builds in the included challenge scenarios.
Customise
Make rag-dolls from body parts and use them as your custom player character. Mod the game with Lua scripting to create your own custom tools, scenarios, challenges and mini-games.
Share
Share your creations with the community, try out what others have made, and maybe learn a new building trick or two along the way!
Articles
Hey everyone, the GearBlocks Steam store page is now live, with the latest demo available to download with Workshop integration and more. Check it out, and don’t forget to add the game to your wishlist!
I think from now on up until Early Access release, I'll just keep updating the demo on Steam, rather than posting more builds here on IndieDB (unless there's a particular demand for it, let me know!)
After you’ve downloaded the demo on Steam, come and join the community on the GearBlocks Discord.
The latest demo removes support for the legacy save format, so saves from demo builds older than 0.5.7362 will no longer load.
NOTE: To load your old saved games / constructions in the new Steam demo, first make sure you load them in the previous demo version (0.5.7362) and save them back out to convert them to the new save format.
The gear physics have been improved so they are now set to have more reasonable masses (i.e. much lighter than before). Also some have additional axle attachment points, which allows for greater flexibility with what you can do with the gears.
Here’s an example, the red hand of this stopwatch (indicating seconds) is rigidly attached to an axle “passing through” the central gear via a rotary bearing, while the white hand (showing minutes) is attached to another short axle rigidly attached to one of the gear’s new attachment points.
Other possibilities with these extra attachments include using the gear as a crank, attaching a structure such as a rotating platform to the gear, or even attaching other gears to the gear!
As I mentioned earlier, I've also implemented basic Steam Workshop support in the demo. This allows for sharing saved constructions from within the game (soon I'll be extending this to sharing saved games too) and you can browse the Workshop from within the game.
Finally, another quick change was to make the seat fabrics be paintable, to add a bit more variety to the seats!
For more info and to follow the development progress, check out the GearBlocks website, and my dev blog right here on IndieDB.
More links:-
Welcome to GearBlocks
News 4 commentsWelcome to GearBlocks, a game about creative building, physics based machines, and gears - lots of gears.
Files
GearBlocks Demo 0.5.7362 Win32
Demo 3 commentsGearBlocks pre-alpha demo - build 0.5.7362. In this build: new saved game format (old saves converted over when saved back out), performance optimisations...
GearBlocks Demo 0.5.7273 Win32
Demo 8 commentsGearBlocks pre-alpha demo - build 0.5.7273. This update is all about improving the player character, with a new character model, better player animations...
GearBlocks Demo 0.5.7019 Win32
Demo 3 commentsGearBlocks pre-alpha demo - build 0.5.7019. This update introduces the material tool that allows beam and plate materials to be swapped on the fly. Also...
GearBlocks Demo 0.5.6773 Win32
DemoGearBlocks pre-alpha demo - build 0.5.6773. In this build: Construction UI improvements, new collision audio system, servo motor tweaks, and more. See...
GearBlocks Demo 0.5.6628 Win32
Demo 1 commentGearBlocks pre-alpha demo - build 0.5.6628. NOTE: DO NOT INSTALL OVER AN EXISTING INSTALLATION, PLEASE UNINSTALL THE OLD DEMO FIRST! In this build: improved...
GearBlocks Demo 0.4.6450 Win32
Demo 3 commentsGearBlocks pre-alpha demo - build 0.4.6450. NOTE: SAVED FILE LOCATION CHANGED (SEE RELEASE NOTES FOR DETAILS), IF YOU WANT TO LOAD YOUR OLD SAVES, YOU'LL...
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Hey i have an idea
You could make an ignition system for the gas motors you are making
I am liking the game that is released to us but is there any chance of the full game release date even an estimation
I'm afraid I don't have a date yet for the first early access release of the full game, I need to plan out the remaining tasks for this release before I can work out a realistic date. I'll be getting stuck into this planning phase very soon hopefully!
一个来自中国的玩家：游戏制作真的真棒，支持！
Hey sam! I would like a ''draw distance'' setting, because I was getting so much lag (in a very low-end machine) due to rendering.
If you turn down the "model detail" setting, that will reduce the draw distance of dynamic objects in the world. I didn't expose a draw distance setting for the entire scene (e.g. terrain), but I've experimented with this in the past and it doesn't really make much impact on frame rate.
The rendering performance tends to be mostly fill rate bound, so turning off all of the rendering effects (e.g. "reflections"), lowering the "texture filtering" & "shadow detail" settings, and lowering the screen resolution makes the biggest frame rate improvement.
Changing these settings still might not be sufficient to get a playable frame rate on very low end machines however. The game uses HDR, PBR, and deferred lighting, which all have an inherent rendering performance cost that can't easily be avoided without breaking the look of the game. Perhaps if there's sufficient demand for it, I could add a simplified rendering mode that does away with these features. It would completely change the look of all the materials and lighting in the game, and would require reworking a lot of the assets.
Sorry I couldn't give a more satisfying answer, but I hope this was somewhat helpful at least!
Hello! I have a suggestion: you should thinking about implement some u-joints and kingpins, it would make game much esier to build some real constructions :)
btw. sorry for bad english :P
Thanks for your suggestion! The full version of the game already has CV joints, ball & socket joints, suspension uprights, suspension control arms, and many other parts. I really wanna reveal all this stuff, but I still have a lot more work to do on the game first.
There's a little something that I uncovered long ago, but never got around to reporting until now. All the gears have the same mass (Except the rack gear). This makes the 8t gears probably the densest object in the game.
I made a scale to show this concept (the wheel has 50):
Puu.sh
Aha, well spotted! Yes, unfortunately the gears must all have the same mass, otherwise the physics constraints between them don't work very well (causing the gears to "slip" under high torque loads).
I'd love to find a way to make the gears work while giving them more appropriate masses. Setting them all to the same mass is basically a hack, which I'm not too happy with if I'm honest. Maybe I'll figure something out, but until then I'm kinda stuck with things the way they are!