GameTrailers is hosting a World of Goo contest and inviting everyone to submit videos of their gooey and goo-like creations. Check out the amazing prize packages they’re offering…

The grand prize for each of the two categories is:

• A trip for 2 to Los Angeles during E3 2009 and visit the GT office
• 10,000 Nintendo Points™
• Wii™ System
• Nintendo DSi™ system
• 52″ Flat Screen Sharp TV
• Bose® – CineMate® Digital Home Theater Speaker System

Two runner ups in each category will each receive:

• Wii™ system
• Nintendo DSi™ system
• 10,000 Nintendo Points™

The deadline for entry is April 10 and winners are announced on April 14.  Hey, GameTrailers, can Kyle and I enter this contest too?

it’s september 1, 2006, and we’re now slightly past the get-something-on-the-screen phase.

notes from ron: i’ve played around with the physics a bit, added the walking logic for the balls, and got rid of the awful aliasing around the balls and strands.  the main drive was simply to get things looking a little more “presentable”.  if you run the code (here’s a download link) you can hit CTRL+ALT+D to enable debug mode.  it’ll look something like this:

those lines and numbers are visual aids for debugging the balls’ walking and climbing logic.  in-game visual debugging is an amazing tool that we don’t see used often enough.  a bug that might take hours of stepping through code to figure out could be instantly seen with the right kind of visualization.

Notes from Kyle: The background image in the above early version was the first piece of art that we thought might be “final” – essentially a softer, “more casual” (because we originally thought we were making a casual game, like bejeweled) version of the original Tower of Goo prototype over there on the right. ->

I still sucked as an artist, and had not yet discovered Photoshop’s wonderful vector technology! The art here was all drawn with a mouse and Photoshop’s paint brush, and carefully tweaked and tuned to look like vector art. A lot of effort, for minimal payoff. This art style was unsustainable, and unimpressive. But at the time, we thought the game was looking mighty shiny.

In the original Tower of Goo prototype, Goo Balls didn’t have eyes! They must have had internal gyroscopes to know which way was up. And to answer a question in the comments, yep, the Tower of Goo prototype came before the peewee prototype. It was the little toy that made us think making a game about sticky balls might be possible! And if you’re not the ESRB, listen carefully to the voices…

for a while now we’ve been meaning to post some early childhood snapshots of world of goo, to dig deep into our code repository and remember the good ol’ days.  the early part of  a game’s development is often very enjoyable because things evolve rapidly and there’s a great sense of accomplishment.  it’s also a lot of fun to look back at those early days and laugh at what the game use to look and feel like.  before all the levels, before all the polish, before the months of bug fixing, there was this:

the date is august 20, 2006. the game is about one week old.  basic rendering, collision detection, and physics are in place.  no music or animations.  it feels like you’re dragging balls inside a jar of honey and the connection logic for the strands is non-intuitive and often results in odd, unstable structures.  the player is also able to grab the structure itself and swing it around like the wet towel that it is.  and there are intellectual property issues, to boot :)

if you’d like to try it out for yourself, grab and unzip this file and run tog.exe (as you can tell, the game hadn’t been named yet).

more soon.