october 11, 2006.  our baby is two months old! isn’t it cute?

notes from ron: now that the core mechanic is in place and the balls are juicy, focus has turned to adding some structure around the core mechanic.  there’s a loading screen, a main menu, player profiles, a world map (just when you thought we were done with copyright infringement), and we’ve added the ability to put flash movies as cutscenes in between levels.  you can also finish a level now and have that unlock the next level.  before the pipe, we thought of the “exit” from each level as a mysterious animated vortex which at this point looks like an ugly spiral that a programmer would draw (sorry ’bout that).  also, notice that the balls bounce when they hit the ground, another feel/experience enhancement that has no meaning for the game mechanic.

here’s a download link if you want to try for yourself.  if you like digging around in files, you’ll see that we added an xml file that describes the order in which levels are played (<root>/res/worlds/default), that the main menu is itself a level (<root>/res/levels/MainMenu), and that we started working on a level editor (<root>/res/levels/LevelBuilderDefault), which we never got very far on.

Notes from Kyle: Man, this game sucks so far!

What is the game even about? What do the goo balls even look like? What are they climbing towards in each level? A spinning vortex? A bucket on a stick? (actually a possibility at one point) World of Goo Corporation didn’t exist yet, so we didn’t yet know there would be an international network of pipes, sucking goo out of each level! (more on that in the next edition)

But first – How are the levels arranged?

Are they presented as a list in a big menu and you get a little star next to each level when completed? (No, that would be underwhelming.) Maybe each level appears as a point on a map like Mario 3? (We eventually went more towards this direction.) Here are some menu options we were considering early on, and rolling on a bit into the future as we gradually discover the game’s eventual WORLDMAP->ISLAND->LEVEL layout, and … World of Goo Corporation.

Maybe the main menu would be like a casual game? Choose a button to start the game, some options, whatever?  We eventually discarded this idea, because the text and buttons were too obviously removed from the fiction of the game:

What if the menu buttons were more a part of the world?

Hmm… Better, but still a bit too artificial.

Meanwhile, you can see below, we’re starting to get closer to the concept of a series of “islands”, each containing a series of “levels”. I wonder what ever happened to the giant rocket ship and the tentacle monster? The art style is getting a little better, but it is still too fluffy and innocuous, like something that would come out of an egg on Easter.

The center island was still something other than World of Goo Corporation – I don’t know what it was, but the idea here was that each “island”, when complete, would transmit some useful resource to the center island (like electricity, water, whatever) and when all 5 were connected, the light bulb would turn on, and then something would happen, and you win.

Another sketch, maybe with a little more terrain detail?

Meh. Too complicated. Too much stuff on one screen. Maybe if you click an “island” it will zoom into a more detailed island view?

You can see below (click to see higher res image), the idea of World of Goo Corporation is beginning to materialize. The last “island” was going to take place inside the corporation. And you can see there was a separate island for the sandbox building mode called “Tower of Goo Island”. It seems obvious now, but at this point, we had not considered merging World of Goo Corporation with the sandbox building mode:

The world is still too cluttered and confusing. And our logo sure sucked! But, when you click on an island, you go here! (click to enlarge) The world is starting to look a bit more familiar:

This flow of world->island->level seemed to work well. But how would we transition between them? Here’s an early prototype. (Notice a very early version of “Impale Sticky”!):

For comparison, here’s the final main menu (we went with a simple silhouette, where islands light up as you move over them), and final version of Island 1:

That’s all for now. “How we learned about pipes” in the next edition!

two weeks have gone by and world of goo is now 5 weeks old.  as a screenshot, it hasn’t changed much in two weeks, but it feels completely different when you play it.  you can download this build here.

since we knew that the game would be some collection of puzzles, or levels, we needed to start defining what a level is in order to start working on level design.  if you look inside this build you’ll see our first attempt to define the level format.  it’s in <root>/res/levels/GooHill/GooHill.xml.  this level format allows us to create layers at different depths for a parallax effect (see the clouds?) and to define the physical geometry from which the actual structure of the level is comprised.  press CTRL+ALT+D to enable debug mode and see the physical geometry.  also added force and velocity vectors to visual debugging.

but the main focus of these two weeks was to bring the goo balls to life.  the ball definition file (<root>/res/balls/balls.xml) was enhanced  to allow for balls with “moving parts”.  eyes and pupils were added, the goo balls look where they’re going, glance around, and stare at you when you mouse over them.  their eyes jiggle when you move them around to make them feel more squishy and juicy and they have different animations for different parts in different states (falling, attached, walking, etc).  there’s also the first attempt at making them cast shadows, which was super simple but had serious limitations.  another new thing in this version is the ability to throw the balls around.  it adds absolutely nothing to how you play the game, but it feels good.  that’s probably the most important thing i learned from kyle so far, that game design is more about crafting an experience than perfecting a game mechanic.

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…