Doodle God

I stumbled over an article about an iPhone app while browsing the news online. The game “Doodle God” is a rather unique game. I did a Google search and found out that there’s also a flash version of the game online.

The principle of the game is rather simple: by combining elements you create new one. But it’s the mass of different elements you can create that actually makes the game so fun. You start out with the four basic elements: fire, water, air, earth. By combining them, you then create new elements like lava (fire + earth), steam (water + air), swamp (water + earth), alcohol (fire + water – the game doesn’t take everything seriously), dust (earth + air) and energy (fire + air). Then you combine those elements (not all of them can be combined) and go on. Over time, you create things like humans, ghosts, dragons, birds, trees, various chemical elements and much more. All in all, there’s 115 elements in the game and you start off with only four of them.

The elements come in 14 groups (four are the basic elements, the others are such groups as aether [containing things like energy, life, egg, seeds or lightning], basic life [such as moss, weed, bacteria, worm and mushroom] or human [containing various types of humans, such as wizard, hunter or warrior]). So you call up two groups (or twice the same if you want to), choose one element from every group and, if you are lucky, they get combined into a new element (sometimes even two or three elements).

Most of the combination are rather logical. A feather and paper, for instance, combine into a book. Clay and fire combine into bricks. A human and stone combine into a hut. Some are a bit stranger. A dinosaur and fire combine into a dragon. A bird and fire combine into a phoenix and a bird and a storm combine into a thunderbird. If you give life to clay, you get a golem. If you give life to this golem, it turns into a human. And so on.

It takes a while to find all combinations (I wouldn’t have half of them now, had I not been looking online for a few tips). So it’s a game you can play for a long while without getting bored. And you even get to create a car and an airplane towards the end.