Bad Piggies for Beginners

[yimmy7]

This is a beginners guide to Bad Piggies, made specifically for those who haven’t gotten the hand of the masterpiece called “Bad Piggies.”

First things first: physics. Bad Piggies haven’t found a way around it yet, so you’re gonna have to obey its laws. But remember that the Bad Piggies are masters of poor construction, and their engines do not run smoothly.

OK, so you want to know how to place objects? It’s simple. Just drag and drop onto the grid, and it will automatically connect to whatever it’s touching. To rotate something just tap it. Please note: if an object has something it can connect to next to it, it will automatically connect to it. Objects that are not connected to anything drop, and may fall off.

Now you’re probably wondering what to do with these boxes and wheels that you’re given. You know how to place them, but how do you make something that will actually move? Well, wheels move easier than boxes. Oh yeah, to do anything you have to put the pig in the box. If you need help with the first level, see the walkthrough.

BASIC BUILDING COMPONENTS
Required Objects (Pig, King Pig, egg, pumpkin filled with candy):

You can put these in boxes, and they are required to beat the level (except King Pig, who is just optional for an extra star). They all take up one spot, except King Pig, who is 2 tiles tall and 3 tiles wide.

Boxes (wood and metal):
You can place engines, TNT, and required objects in these. You can also connect anything to it.

Wheels (wood, metal, small, and powered):

Wood, metal, small and powered wheels will turn under the influence of gravity or some other device creating motion in a partially horizontal direction. Powered wheels turn when powered by a motor, and can be turned on and off.

Bellows and Fans:
Bellows blow a single blow, while fans turn on and off. Both are very weak, unless an engine is added to give extra power.

Soda (black and green):

These will shake up for a second and then give a short burst of speed in the direction opposite the opening.

TNT:

TNT explodes and usually breaks everything nearby, but there is a chance metal will survive unharmed. TNT can be placed inside boxes. TNT also blows stuff far away.

Umbrellas (normal and powered):

Umbrellas open and close. Normal umbrellas will open or close with a single click. Powered will automatically open and close, and are used for pulling yourself in a single direction. When an umbrella closes it will push your vehicle forward. Umbrellas, when open, will slow you down

Springs:

Springs are bouncy, and can be used to keep a contraption from breaking.

Engines (Green, Grey, and Red):
Engines make stuff that you turn on and off stronger. Green is weakest, and Red is strongest.

I’m only describing objects introduced in Ground Hog Day, since figuring out how stuff works is part of the fun. Hopefully, with this information, you should be able to learn how to play the game and enjoy it as much as I do.

Helpful links

Bad Piggies Hands-on First Look of Actual Gameplay and Features

Bad Piggies Now Available! Everything You Need to Get Started

Topic

[MVNLA2]

@yimmy7 — You can edit your post above to include the old videos from Slim.

[MVNLA2]

@Les-Toreadors — Does Pigineering have a test that shows whether green or black soda bottles are more powerful?

[yimmy7]

I did a vertical and horizontal test, and both came out with the same results: they have the same power

[Les Toreadors]

Hello @yimmy7, your beginners’ guide is excellent; I had an enjoyable time reading it. Not many people think to document the basics of playing Bad Piggies but for many users not familiar with sandbox mobile games, people can often get confused ‘what’s the point’ of building incredible machines on their own.

Regarding the black and green soda, @mvnla2 might like to devise a simple test sequence for the soda types.

The first test will be horizontal firing and the next one vertical firing to test horizontal and vertical thrust. If the two sodas have similar thrust output, it means they are differentiated by duration of ‘burn’ just like the red and blue rockets. Thus the vertical test will allow you to observe which one hovers longer.

Likewise blue rocket is not necessarily ‘weaker’ than the red one but the red one burns longer, providing greater “deltaV”, in spacecraft terms.

[yimmy7]

@les-toreadors i tested with both rockets and soda, and they both seem to have the same duration

[Kathy]

Great thread @yimmy7 ;) good job:)

[MVNLA2]

So far haven’t been able to find a test that distinguishes between green and black sodas.
Likewise haven’t been able to find a difference between red and blue rockets. Grrr!
So why do I think it really makes a difference in some levels?

[Les Toreadors]

Interesting, try this:

2 wooden blocks connected with a soda in the middle, with two wooden wheels under the wood blocks. Soda moves the vehicle to the right on Field of Dreams.

Test with black and greens. Measure distance covered between black and green. See if they are still identical. This is a really primitive way to measure deltaV.

ps. Your forum thread (this one) is now frontpaged on Facepork :)

[yimmy7]

yay i’m famous :) what i did, was in the first sandbox made a three box cart, with 2 wheels, and put a soda on top and bottom, and put green behind to see if it would catch up

[Les Toreadors]

I’ll go play with the soda tests later and see if there’s any way to differentiate between them besides the color.

See, even beginner level experiments can be very engaging :)

[mtuppurainen]

I could give you a definitive answer (as I’m the lead designer of BP), but that would be too easy! Why not test first and I’ll confirm the results after :)

[MVNLA2]

@Mtuppurainen @Maker — Ah Hah! A real Bad Piggie speaks up. Just the person I’ve been dying to ask questions of.
So @Flurrt @Habink said that Bad Piggies uses Unity 3D as the physics engine, and that is mentioned in the credits, but I wasn’t sure what it was. Apparently Unity 3D’s physics simulation is based on Box 2D, which is what the rest of the Rovio games use (I think). So why does Bad Piggies have so many more physically “unrealistic” things that happen. Have you just gone really wild and “unphysical” with the material properties?
While I’m at it, would love to know how you vary the physical parameters / object placement in the rest of the AB games to give seemingly random occurrence of self-destruction, and instability. See

Self-Destroying and Unstable Levels

and the linked older version of the forum.
Hope you don’t regret showing your true colors. : D

[Les Toreadors]

@maker – Thanks for your reply!

It’s quite easy to experiment but it was more fun to keep everyone wondering about the different capabilities of different items. I enjoy the fact that we are able to create all sorts of incredible hi tech machinery based on the very “imperfections” of the physics engine mentioned by @mvnla2. I believe the first such ‘sci fi’ devices first appeared merely a few months after the game’s release and my general opinion is that those glitches should NOT be fixed but rather left open for players to discover.

There are plenty of “perfect” Newtonian sims out there but none of them have the replay and educational value of Bad Piggies. Yes I mean it, an imperfect physics model has far more EDUCATIONAL value than a sterile environment that penalizes creative experimentation.

The fact that there are surprising results to all sorts of simple sandbox experiments arguably has far more educational and replay value than giving people a perfect Newtonian physics simulator. Bad Piggies is not sterile and various creative means to use items and parts can make a vehicle come alive through organic-like behavior of the entire construction.

[mtuppurainen]

Unity is primarily made for 3D games and it uses PhysX engine as a default, whereas Angry Birds games have been made with house engine utilizing Box2D. (Unity is currently trying to cater more for 2D games, also implementing the Box2D. However, B2D is in many ways more limited that PhysX. Also most of the Angry Birds random destruction is caused by Box2D, some of the levels are pushing the boundaries of what it can handle).

Soon into development we found that PhysX is far from perfect, but the options were limited. As the game was made with a core team of 6, we didn’t discover most of the “unphysical” things until when they were posted on Pigineering and other sites. The team reacted to some of them (like providing a legitimate option to the boxing glove causing blocks to detach, which probably wasn’t PhysX related anyway), but mostly they just left them be.

Partly this is because compensating for PhysX’s imperfections would be a huge undertaking, partly because just of the fun factor! The team is just as entertained with the new finds as the rest of the Pigineering audience :)

[Les Toreadors]

@maker, I truly appreciate the ‘decoupler’ item that was ‘mysteriously’ left for players to discover in Field of Dreams.

An unintended fun usage of the decoupler is that… if you stack them up and change the colors, it looks like a traffic light! Thanks to @alfiandi for this one.

I think of all the glitches the only one that needs to be fixed or dealt with right now is the “remote propulsion” glitch. Being able to simulate Nikola Tesla’s wireless power transmission tech is fun at first but people now use this glitch to disable the Road Hogs timer, meaning they can complete levels with 0.00 seconds on the clock. Unfortunately due to this I have never suggested doing Road Hogs competitions here or at our facepork page, because the remote propulsion means everyone not using the glitch has no chance to compete fairly.

The ‘tesla propulsion’ glitch is also popularly known as Hyperdriving and it involves using TNT to separate a vehicle from its engines which are left on the ground.

The power continues to transmit from the stack of engines left behind, to the moving portion of the contraption. The ability to remotely power objects is created if and when there is no component failure (krak snap) during TNT detonation.

A simple way to fix this glitch is to simply, make it compulsory for TNT to be surrounded by a wood or metal box if it is to be attached to a vehicle.

Right now, a block of TNT placed between two other blocks, will actually lock them together as though the TNT were a structural component. Disabling the ‘TNT as structure’ material property should disable the remote propulsion glitch, as with the proposed fix, the TNT without enclosure to simply fall to the ground and explode on game start.

Likewise, boxing gloves without a structure can make a vehicle part unbreakable, as the bonding between a boxing glove (without enclosure) and the part beside it is invulnerable to stress forces. Thus a wood / boxing glove / wood object sequence is totally unbreakable and is easy to test.

In closing, I think it is really fun to finally be able to converse in such detail about material design and physical properties, and I have @mvnla2 to thank for starting this discussion :)

[mtuppurainen]

Tesla bug was is of my personal favorites. We analyzed it and figured out what caused it, but also found out there was no easy fix around it (more PhysX goodness).

Road Hogs was a one off idea (actually inspired by the early sandbox racing videos on Pigineering ;) but it was deemed a bit far from the core game, this is why it hasn’t been tinkered with since.

It would also have been beneficial if I’d spotted this thread earlier, as the team has been reassigned for prototyping the next piggie titles :)

[yimmy7]

New Piggie titles!!!!!!! i’m so excited!

[Les Toreadors]

@maker – That must have been the Piggs Peak ATV Championship. I remember I was reading about the Pikes Peak Hillclimb challenge and thought the fans could do something similar in Ground Hogs 1 sandbox. It also takes reference from BBC Top Gear’s style of presentation.

GH1 (Level S-1) was chosen as it requires only a simple vehicle to enter the competition and the response was overwhelming. I decided to extend the race season for another week due to Hurricane Sandy (with respect to American Bad Piggies fans who were unable to post) and so it was a one off competition of epig scale.

I still keep the above leaderboard image as a homage to everyone who had participated and demonstrated a lot of very creative engineering to set both records and very notable “best effort” finishes from unlikely looking contraptions.

Today, we do not need to run such competitions as in my opinion, Road Hogs is a very good standalone, fully automated version of our competition. I especially enjoy driving in the horizontal levels and find the 3-star times to be very remarkable in that they require some effort to achieve the 3-star time.

Road Hogs needs a bit of ‘gentlemanly’ discipline not to disable the timer with the earlier-mentioned side effect of Tesla propulsion, but if played as the designers intended, is both challenging and highly entertaining.

Of course, the first thing I did was try and make a “tissue box plane” flying machine to try and see if I could increase the level of competition beyond ATVs.

Over the next days and weeks I believe the iOS players have gone even faster than aircraft and I have not really attempted to compete at that level because I am a lazy pig and just like Sunday cruising with my tissuebox planes lol! As we go faster and faster there is a very fine line between a successful rocket powered dash and krak snap due to in-flight stresses and pilot error, so I told myself enough is enough and went back to crash test pigging in Field of Dreams.

Infact I am probably the only player that deliberately adds safety features to Road Hogs vehicles despite the time penalty from excess weight, as this is what real race engineers would do.

So even without tinkering or updates I think Road Hogs is a very worthwhile feature to develop, ties in with AB:GO very well (according to the preview cutscene, Pigs were racing and Angry Birds hijacked the tournament!), and above all I am very honoured to learn now that it was taken from the Piggs Peak ATV challenge :)

Also I finally stopped building silly machines for a while and tested the green/black soda and the blue/red rockets.

Yeah, they have exactly the same specific impulse and burn duration. I am always amazed by how Bad Piggies continues to surprise me even after an entire year of playing the game. Bad Piggies has replaced all my MMO games and simulator games, and it’s thanks to newer community members like @yimmy7 here that allow us to constantly find new topics to explore in the realm of “bacon dynamics” research!

The fun thing I have been doing is that I always thought the green is more powerful than the black and the red is more potent than the blue and designed all my machinery to that expectation! It’s like being a Victorian pharmacist doling out decently effective traditional remedies without knowing what exactly caused sickness, as was the case in the early 19th Century! Bad Piggies then is not just a physics simulator but invites us to quest for knowledge and remember how humans progressed from the Industrial Revolution to modern locomotion and beyond. Because a lot of the techniques Bad Piggies players use to rapid-prototype working machinery, is arguably similar (on a basic scale) to how scientists and engineers may approach real world problems through critical thinking and evaluations.

Hey @dh-kim, meet the @Maker. DH Kim is the No. 1 Bad Piggies player in Korea and he very much enjoys finding new “unintended features”, recently with grappling hooks stuck in midair, and other fun stuff I haven’t found practical usage of yet :)

Edit: Decided to make a little Facebook tribute to the Piggs’ Peak thing.

[DH Kim]

Something cool was going on here! :)

Never knew there were Rovio staffs here, It seems this kinda “direct reporting” may be the most efficient way to have a bug fixed.

[mtuppurainen]

It’s been great to see the fans make the most out of the game. As I mentioned, we’ve been following Pigineering from day 1.

The decision behind having two kinds of (equally powered) soda bottles and rockets was based on giving more leeway for level design. It allowed for phasing the launches with the control buttons instead of having to click on the separate items in the vehicle itself.

The soda was introduced in the early stages as a weaker version of the rocket, one must learn to walk before running :)

[Les Toreadors]

I recall following the pre-release artwork for Bad Piggies via the Angry Birds Facebook page – I think at that point of time everyone would be wondering what was this strange game because back then the only hint to gameplay was the quite cryptic trailer showing pigs flying. Then there was the gameplay trailer itself which showed, well, pigs flying all over the place which piqued by curiosity.

“Is it like a 2D version of Kerbal Space Program?”
“Can engines be throttled, vehicles steered or is it just on/off driving like slot cars?”

I actually did get the chance to ask Rovio employees about Bad Piggies in person thanks to the Angry Birds: Heikki event at Fairmont Hotel, Singapore during the F1 race last year.

I ‘escaped’ from my office during lunch and after work to check out the event and my, I had fun with the AB:H Singapore level which was quite incredibly challenging. I didn’t and still don’t care to ‘cheat’ and watch 3-star walkthroughs on YouTube, so I ended up teaching newer players (in real life, mind you) how to solve problems using engineering derived solutions.

Unfortunately I must have sounded like a terrorist because I was teaching people how to undermine structures which looked like actual Singapore buildings. Collapse those boring flats! Build pig structures in their place! :)

It was later during the evening session that a gentleman from the event team talked to me quite extensively about my Angry Birds interest and eventually I did pluck up the courage to ask about the new pig game. I did ask the questions I want to ask but I was requested to ‘wait and see’ on the gameplay mechanics. No spoilers!

I then commented:

“The Bad Piggies media to date is awesome” and he replied, “Yes, it is :)” Finally I asked if Rovio would allow me to make a fanpage for the pigs and I guess we know the rest of the story from there :)

It was later during local news coverage of the event that I realized the gentleman I spoke to was Rovio’s Vice President!

And that’s the story of how Bad Piggies became a quite important routine in my life for the past year. It’s all the fun little details and friendly enthusiasm for all things pig and mechanical that makes Bad Piggies more than just a game.

Eventually Bad Piggies did replace Kerbal Space Program as my sandbox “space simulator”. Incredibly. Despite the lack of actual space content. Just photoshop a space background. Pigs can fly very well, so well, they should go to space, out of the reach of Angry Bird slingshots. Lol.

[MVNLA2]

@Les-Toreadors — I missed your last post here. Was it Peter Vesterbacka, the Mighty Eagle of Rovio, that you met? He must have been there.

[Anonymous]

@yimmy7 You should update it now because of the custom contraption update.