The Butterfly Effect is a physics-based 2D puzzle about cause and effect.
You have to complete complex but unfinished “machines” made out of everyday objects in order to solve a simple task, such as toppling a bowling pin or popping a balloon. This is also known as a Rube Goldberg machine.
You have several objects to build your contraptions, such as ramps, levers, walls, wedges, balls, bowling pins, balloons, cacti, cola bottles with mint (they blast off if you nudge them), penguins, butterflies (of course!), springs, remotely-detonated dynamite, and a few more.
- The Butterfly Effect 0.9.3.1, level “Contraption 1”
- The Butterfly Effect 0.9.3.1, level “Hole-in-One”
As of version 0.9.3.1 (“Milestone B”), the game comes with 76 playable levels. Difficulty is between very easy and medium for most levels. A few levels are difficult.
The game is fully playable and of alpha quality (many bugs, missing features). In my opinion the user interface needs more love, there should be more levels (More! More! More!), especially difficult ones. And there are many small and a few big bugs.
The Butterfly Effect also has a built-in level editor to make your own levels. But it is a bit confusing to use, some features are missing and also it has lots of bugs, even crashes.
It is currently more developer-centric than user-centric. Some things need documentation and some things should be explained better.
The level format itself it pretty powerful, you can customize almost every aspect of any object, such as size, friction, bounciness, or even the collision outline, pivot point or a custom image, as long you know how (when in doubt, talk to us!).
Simple custom objects (rectangle, circle or polygon outline) can be added on a per-level basis.
The Butterfly Effect is available in English, German and Dutch, other languages are available but incomplete.
Home page: http://the-butterfly-effect.org/
Project page: https://github.com/the-butterfly-effect/tbe
IRC: irc://irc.freenode.net/#tbe
License of everything: GPLv2
Version (at the time of this writing): 0.9.3.1 or “Milestone B”
We seek contributers of the following kind:
- Level designers
- People who give us ideas for new levels
- Testers and playtesters (our bugtracker is here: https://github.com/the-butterfly-effect/tbe/issues)
- Translators (using Transifex)
- Programmers
If you want to create levels with the level editor, but don't really understand how it works (which is likely), talk to us in IRC.
But level ideas alone are welcome as well.
In that case, tell us as precisely as possible what your idea is (preferably here: https://github.com/the-butterfly-effect/tbe/issues, but other places such as this forum thread or IRC are also OK).
