Inside the Touch Pack for Windows 7: Blackboard

Third to be touched upon is Microsoft Blackboard, a pseudo-physics game (reminiscent of The Incredible Machine and featuring graphics gaspingly similar to Crayon Physics) in which you use gestures to rotate and resize various objects to get balloons to explode from a light bulb’s hot touch. Like Rebound this game was developed by our friends at Fuel Games. As a huge bonus to those that can’t pass the first level, I’ve included the solve below.

[flv:http://static.withinwindows.com/files/uploads/flv/blackboard.flv 720 448]

Digging through the technical innards of the Touch Pack games is a rather tedious and fruitless process… but for blog post series completion purposes, Blackboard is yet another Win32 application tying into the usual DirectX and PhysX APIs, requiring shader support for high fidelity, etc. What’s new here, however, is mention of a level editor. Lets hope a) it materializes and b) is as easy to use as Tinker’s editor was.