We’re starting to dip our toes in the waters of prototyping again. One of the first steps was trim down the framework we built for World of Goo and gear it towards a rapid prototyping workflow.  This means two things:

1. Minimizing the amount of code required to set up a new game
2. Providing all the basic facilities so as to avoid wasting time reinventing the wheel (2D rendering, sound, input, persistence layer, and resource management)

There’s nothing revolutionary about this framework,  but in the hope that it is useful to others, we decided to throw out the source code.   Download, unzip, and check out the readme.html file for setup instructions.  There is no documentation and we’re not going to support this code.  There are two example projects included, so check those out and hopefully everything will make sense :).

Also, we set up a new board on our forum in case people want to discuss the framework or share their creations.

It turned 1 today.

We have been informed that you can now get the Wii version of World of Goo on Amazon! When you buy it, it gives you a secret code to type into your Wii, and then some internet magic happens that makes the game get on your Wii.

A common question is “Why Amazon? Why not just get the game on WiiWare like usual?” I’m sure this doesn’t apply to anyone reading this blog - but a lot of Wii owners still don’t know what WiiWare is, or even that their Wii can connect to the Internet at all.  This new Amazon thing means we can now tell non-tech people “yeah, just get it on Amazon” - and it comes with clear instructions on how to connect, and get the game, from an online store they already know about. We hope so anyway. We’ll see! Thanks to Nintendo of America for setting this up, and using us as the first game!

The multi-talented Sebastian Wolff (GermanSeabass) has transcribed (by ear!) all 27 songs from the soundtrack. Video of him playing the full 14-minute medley below, with complete sheet music on his site here.

I was lucky enough to meet up with Sebastian briefly at GDC a few weeks ago where we chatted about favorite composers over tea time and he gave me my very own bound copy of the sheet music! Also check his Kingdom Hearts medley.