D.I.Y. Game Mechanics by Introversion

Beyond brilliant! I am so fascinated by what the people over at Introversion are doing. One thing had struck me as ingenious; they are creating a system where you can build your own complex gadgets out of simple things. The basics of this is simple: create objects in the world that do one task (perhaps two) such as a wire that transmits a signal of 1 if on and 0 if off, and other objects that respond to signals , such as bomb detonating when it receives a signal of 1 and stays off when receiving a signal of 0. Things can get more intricate when you throw in time delays, motion sensors, and laser trip lines creating dynamic environments where saboteurs actually have to look at what wire they are cutting rather than holding the action button for 8 seconds.

Imagine the things you can make with some simple tools. Lets throw in some neat examples, so what can you make with, wires, sliding door, a motion sensor, a few trip lines, an explosive, a keypad, a gun-turret, pressure pads, some time delays, and an alarm... it almost seems like an electricians play ground...or explosives expert. If you were playing against another player, you can set up elaborate defense systems or traps and the other player will have to do some undercover recon to take note of all your defenses and to see how to bypass them. With a system like this , custom downloadable content is foreseeable and perhaps in some sort of MMO universe it could even be a class of some sorts that builds templates and sells them for mega credits depending on how useful it is.

I don't know why we haven't seen this in games as simple as it is. Half Life 2 did try this with some of their force shields and ....... force shields, and as trivial as it was - using the gravity gun to pull the plug - it still brought a different side of gameplay us gamers haven't seen and we felt proud knowing we "figured" out how to turn off the .. shields .

This is such a great design and I plan on using a derivation of this in future games.