Pandora’s Gearbox

Pandora’s Gearbox is puzzle game where you’re trying to get a ball though a machine to the finish area.  You can’t see into the machine, so you have to guess what’s inside.  You have several tools that help you in your task.  You can move objects that are red directly.  You also have a robot with built-in sonar that can explore the inside of the puzzle.

Here’s a video of the 1st tutorial level being solved:

There are 10 levels included with Pandora’s Gearbox.  Level 1 is a tutorial level that should give you all of the information you need to play.  Here are some tips to help you:

  • You can rotate red items with the arrow keys, use this in cramped levels
  • The robot can teleport to the starting area if stuck; just click on the start
  • The robot can be deactivated with right-click; this is useful if you need to carry it
  • Don’t be afraid to restart the level if things go wrongly
  • Think logically.  If you’re stuck, it’s probably because you haven’t explored all your options.  The game doesn’t require crazy reflexes or luck.

Command Line Options

You can pass various command-line options to the game to do different things:

-nointro Disables the IndieBird logo
-nomusic Disables the music
-fullscreen Run the game in fullscreen mode

These options are only available on PC, Macs have in-game options to toggle fullscreen and music.

Thanks To

Thanks to Mat, Norm, David and Joseph for testing the beta versions of the game.  They suffered so that you don’t have to =).

Erin Catto (www.box2d.org) for the Box2D Physics Library

The makers of the following libraries that were used when making Pandora’s Gearbox:

SDL
SDL_mixer
SDL_Image
FreeType
tinyxml

The text font was downloaded from http://moorstation.org/typoasis/designers/lloyd/

The background textures were downloaded from http://www.grungetextures.com/ and are licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States.

Music by Galdson, Courtesy of www.beatpick.com.  Licensed under Creative Commons Non Commercial Sharealike attribution 3.0 license.

Sound effects were taken from www.freesound.org and are licensed under Creative Commons Sampling Plus 1.0 license.  See http://www.freesound.org/legal.php for details.  The following freesound contributors had their effects used:

Jovica

Legal

This game is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.  See http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/ for human readable form.  Read http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/legalcode for a lawyer-readable text and the specific terms of the license.

If you re-distribute the game, you have to clearly indicate that it may be found at www.indiebird.com