Instead of a puzzle with a fixed outcome (put enough weight on one end of the see-saw and it will hold you up so you can access the next area), the number of variations on the solution approaches infinity, simply because the designers chose to implement physics the way they did.īut wait, you might say. Having foreknowledge of the challenge only made it less likely that I would make especially dumb mistakes or more likely that with repeated effort, I might be able to fulfill the level’s “Obsessive Completion Distinction” criteria. Manipulating the constantly shifting goo towers was a constant, chaotic balancing act. Yet, it struck me that upon seeing a familiar level, I could remember the basics of what sort of structure I had to make to complete the level, yet that foreknowledge didn’t make the level predictable or easy. For most games, I’ve had my fill after beating them once. It had been a few years since I last touched it on the PC, where I played it twice. The actual platform is irrelevant but the fact it was a repeat play-through was important. I was replaying the game on a tablet (thanks in part to the Humble Bundle, I’m one of those people who’s effectively bought the game twice). The significance of World of Goo’s approach to physics gameplay didn’t really hit me until recently. And of course, everyone and their publisher in the big budget side of the industry was touting the flash and show side of physics: whose ragdolls could collapse the most convincingly and whose engines did the best job of hurling explosion debris in a realistic, real-time calculated manner. Even the market for physics-based gameplay featuring amorphous goo balls had been previously blazed, with 2005’s indie platformer, Gish. At the time World of Goo came out, H alf-Life 2 had lately made “physics puzzles” an industry buzzword. That I like the game in question should generally be pre-supposed: while there is value in playing and learning from other’s mistakes, that subject is well trodden by other writers (case in point, the well established “ Bad Designer, No Twinkie!” series) and nailing down the concrete things that make great gameplay is a lot harder that pointing out what makes it bad. This is not a review of the game, but the first in what I hope will be a series (if an irregular one) of analysis from the view of a student, aspiring to be a Famous Game Designer, trying to tease out some of the specific elements that make the game work so well to find traces of the magic “something” that makes the game tick. The obvious superlatives have since been well documented over the course of its history (and multiple ports): charming art style, excellent soundtrack, quirky and unique game mechanic, multiple IGF and other awards. World of Goo Corporation is contractually obligated to state that everyone is a winner and is enthusiastic to celebrate everyone's tower building opportunities equally.Before Minecraft, before smartphones, and before the mass acceptance and dominance of Steam, World of Goo appeared on the internet as a prototype: a product of a student project from Carnage Mellon’s Experimental Gameplay workshop, which two years later would go on to a full release in 2008 and become one of the first high-profile indie success stories of the decade.
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