the final installment in this series is world of goo at 8 months old (april 2, 2007).
it’s now almost 4 months after we thought we were 3 months away from finishing the game. we continue to fool ourselves and think we’ve got another 3 months left to go. the delusion doesn’t stop there. as you can see in the “world menu” (which would eventually become the main menu) we thought we would have 7 chapters in the game. riiiight.
probably the biggest change in this revision is the new physics engine. we scrapped our home grown physics engine in favor of ODE, which gave us a lot more flexibility with the kind of puzzles we could construct. it stung to toss that code away, but it was the right thing to do. it allowed us to create a much wider variety of puzzles.
when you play this version, check out the first level (Going Up). it has been set up as a kind of physics playground to test out different ways to have balls physically interacting with the environment. you can get it here, and once again, if you played a previous build don’t forget to delete \HKEY_LOCALMACHINE\SOFTWARE\2dboy from your registry before running this version.
there’s also more experimentation around showing progress to the player and the end of level sequence.
and that’s about it! we’ll stop here because the rest of the game’s evolution was much slower. it happened in baby steps with new levels, new ball types, lots more playtesting and gameplay tweaks, and within 4 months would become the chapter 1 demo we submitted to the IGF and made available to people who pre-ordered the game.
by this time we’re already doing quite a bit of playtesting. we’ve got 20 levels in the game but only 5 of them would eventually make it into the final version. we’ve decided against having one world map and decide to group the levels into islands.
the art style is clearly coming together but doesn’t yet have the pop and polish of the final art. playtesting was still showing that people who don’t normally play games aren’t getting the game quickly enough to stay engaged. we first tried to address this by adding a tutorial system that you can see in this revision. it sucked. it was complicated and cumbersome and we eventually dropped it when we got the connection logic to feel intuitive enough and it was replaced with a single signpost:
another really ugly thing in this version is how levels end. we struggled with this quite a bit. we wanted the levels to magically end at exactly the time that the user thinks they’re done. first we tried ending them when the right number of balls was sucked into the pipe. that didn’t work because people wanted to suck out more than just the bare minimum. we thought we might want to end a level when no more balls could possibly get sucked into the pipe, but that wouldn’t work either both because it might take a really long time for the level to end while the player just sits there and because it was too difficult to have the game figure out when no more balls could get sucked. in this version we tried to have a 5 second timer after the minimum requirement was met before the level ends, which would allow for suckage optimization (the beginnings of OCD!) but people were simply confused. eventually we dropped the notion of something happening “magically” at the right time and made it a manual process (the continue handle).
you can download this build here. IMPORTANT NOTE: if you played the previous build you’ll need to delete some entries from your registry in order to run the game because the saved data format (which use to be stored in the registry) has changed. run regedit and delete \HKEY_LOCALMACHINE\SOFTWARE\2dboy before running this version.
april’s been a busy month, but we’re back from intermission now!
november 28, 2006. world of goo is now 3.5 months old. so much has happened lately!
the skeleton of the game is now in place and at this point we started playtesting. at first we wondered if we were showing the game to the right people. why are they so bad at it? do they simply suck? it shouldn’t be so difficult to figure this game out! it would take months of playtesting to get it feeling good and to not lose non-gamers after 30 seconds of play. if you play this version, pay attention to your frustration and confusion levels as you try to work through the puzzles. that should give you an indication of how far we still had to go.
see that red 50 up there? we played around with the idea of timed levels, which we later dumped because it felt contrived. the level ’super fuse challenge time’ (which had not yet been born) is a good example of adding a time limit to a level without making it seem artificial.
the game now has a main menu, a world map, and 9 levels to play with. the one pictured above had close to final art. it would later become the level ‘going up’. the rest are mostly place-holder art. 4 of the 9 levels present here made it into the final game, the rest were tossed. go ahead, play them, dance on their graves. you can download this build here. IMPORTANT NOTE: if you played the previous build you’ll need to delete some entries from your registry in order to run the game because the saved data format (which use to be stored in the registry) has changed. run regedit and delete \HKEY_LOCALMACHINE\SOFTWARE\2dboy before running this version.
in the primordial version of ‘impale sticky’ above, you can see that one of the biggest changes yet to come was the series of events and presentation around the end of the level. we clearly had not yet arrived at a good way to show the player how far along they are in meeting the goal of the level, when the goal has been reached, or how/when to progress to the next level.
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!
