I'm making a game about sharpening pencils. The idea came to me in the night one time to make an idle clicker game, but instead of clicking, you crank the crank to make the number go up. It made me laugh, so I decided to do it.
I'd already thought that sharpening pencils would be a great application for the crank so those two ideas came together pretty easily. I made a first version that was pretty messy and then rewrote it a bit. At the moment it looks like this:
At the start you kick things off by sharpening a pencil by hand, then start the game for real with a crank handle sharpener. I plan to add more kinds of exponential crank-driven mayhem - I think I'm going to focus on some kind of madcap story where you sharpen more and more pencils until there aren't any pencils left to sharpen so you gotta make more pencils to sharpen, something like that.
Also, I recently remembered that David Rees got into sharpening pencils a while back and wrote a book about it. I've been trying to source a copy but it's prettty expensive these days. But look at the colours... remind you of anything?
Anyway development will likely be slow but I'll put updates here. I've added code for a biomass burner so the player can power their uh... stuff, and also made an industrial shredder in Blender and that exported pretty well...
Haha thanks Dan! Worked quite hard on that, hand animating it from the stock image to the start position. Still half of it is roughs and needs some tween frames filled in. Plus for some reason the thing is playing back way too fast in the simulator - goes about half that speed on the device.
I think they were quite common in British schools when I was a lad. They're in the premium range of pencil sharpening tools now, if they weren't back then. A lot of mechanical sharpeners, especially the cheap battery powered ones, now just have a hand pencil sharpener (i.e. a razor blade) stuck to a drum, instead of burrs arranged in an angle. It's not much good for sharpening really.
I know exactly what you mean!