Real Machine
3/17/2023
Conceived and Developed by
Mike Brown,
MB Projects Lab
Copyright © 2023 – All rights reserved
RealMachine is a game that was born out of a desire for something from the Google Play Store that was intellectually challenging and mathematically accurate, as well as visually compelling. After a futile search for something to my liking, my search criteria became the beginning of the specifications of the RealMachine game; and I determined to write it myself.
RealMachine is an engaging game that will inspire your creativity and challenge your tinkering skills, without insulting or bogging down your intuition or knowledge. It challenges you to imagine a mechanism to solve real problems, and provides you with tools to design and build a fully functional 3-Dimensional machine. But rather than design parts with graphic elements, as you would do with traditional CAD systems, you select them from family types and configure and further customize them with a broad variety of features, all from an intuitive user interface. Assembling them into a mechanism is also intuitive with lots of additional menu-driven features. You can manually test and analyze the behavior with observations and measurements, or you can set up and control an operating environment to automate the behavior. At any time, you can explore your creation like a drone in a clock tower, and then save and share your work, plus many other productivity features.
RealMachine was designed to be as intuitive as possible, allowing you to figure out most of the operation by playing through exercises. A free version will include full basic functionality and resources. Paid versions will include additional advanced features and resources.
Unlike engineering CAD systems, RealMachine was designed to be accessible to a broad range of ages and skill levels, from pre-teens to professionals, and usable without training, reading a huge manual, or an intense learning cycle. Hints, tutorials, and explanations make the instructional exercises fun and engaging, and the design challenges doable for everyone. Full documentation can then help more experienced users dive ever deeper into subtle and advanced features.
It is a fun and fast-paced play-space, with genuinely compelling challenges, and immediate and deeply satisfying accomplishments. It is also an excellent educational tool for learning and practicing conceptualization and problem-solving. And even if you don’t engage in designing new machines, it is also just a lot of fun to play around with what you or others have created. Among other things, helpful resources include the ability to upload and download machines, parts, and features that might be easier to modify than to create from scratch.
Also, unlike reality, RealMachine allows you to take liberties with physics to simplify the construction and visualization of your creations, so things like gravity, friction, momentum, and collision avoidance can be selectively disabled. You can also create mechanisms without concern for structural framework, clearances, or fasteners; for example, you can create a rotating shaft without worrying about mounting it on bearings bolted to a frame (as though they were), but you can also propel balls through the air to bounce around and settle into and flow out of a hopper, all as you would intuitively expect them to do.
And that’s not the end of it. All of the parts you create in RealMachine can be exported to a 3D Printer to build physical models of your creations. Plus, it provides a pre-export analysis to suggest additional features and parts that will resolve issues with operating machines in the real world.
And finally a word of warning: RealMachine is a game after all. Although every effort has been made to make the geometry and behavior as mathematically and graphically accurate and responsive as practical, its purpose is for education and entertainment only; it is NOT a production CAD system substitute. The RealMachine simulation and analysis are for aiding in intuitive design – NOT fabrication design. Do NOT presume you can design a successful mechanism in RealMachine, then go out to the shop and build it accordingly – it will probably lack structural integrity and physical behavior. Remember the paragraph above, where it talks about, “taking liberties with physics”? The full effect of real-world physics on parts, materials, clearances, and interactions is simply beyond the scope of this game.
Watch this website. I’ll be updating it as often as I can. I hope you enjoy playing Real Machine it as much as I have enjoyed creating it.