Design lessons from World of Goo

blog.wolfire.com

38 points·bd··7 comments

This is a really fantastic deconstruction of an amazing game. I'm looking forward to more of these reviews.

The game looks really fun. Maybe when I finish the semester I'll buy it.

Does anybody know how the built the game (which languages, toolkits, frameworks, etc)? Its on wii, pc, mac, and linux so it must have been done in an amazingly portable way.

I believe the Wii uses an "OpenGL-like" rendering API. It's probably just a lightly customized version of OpenGL ES.

Really, cross-platform in games is only really hard when you have a significant amount of rendering complexity. 2D games, in particular, are pretty easy to port.

EDIT: Oh, and World of Goo is a freaking great game!

SDL for boilerplate, ODE (Open Dynamics Engine) for the physics. My understanding is that ODE was started by a ex-Havok employee, and it is in fact an excellent oss physics engine.

Not Havok, but close. It was MathEngine, which made Karma physics engine (used for example in old Unreal).

They were later bought by Criterion (RenderWare) which was subsequently acquired by Electronic Arts, where it just died.

Also, these guys have been making pretty amazing games for a while. (I mean, they're indie developers, so check out their demo videos and let your jaw drop.)

wow what great free advertising - before that video was even over I had purchased the game via paypal. Reminds me of a combination of lemmings and fantastic contraption but with much lusher graphics and music.

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