I love you, 2D Boy

If finals are good for anything, it’s inspiring me to finish games that I started a long time ago and never got around to finishing.  Case in point, I finished two games in one day during this quarter’s finals, one of them being World of Goo (and the other being The Path, but we’ll get to that later when I’m feeling more ruthlessly sarcastic and analytical).

I’m a huge fan of Kyle Gabler anyways, what with the Experiment Games Project and what little I had seen of World of Goo so far (basically, the demo, and my friend screaming at it during class breaks).  The kind of innovation that inevitably sprouts from things like EGP just puts me in a fit of glee and has made rapid prototyping something very dear to my heart (and something I like to play with when I have the time- like now!).  Our school is running a rapid prototype competition next quarter and I cannot WAIT.  Excitement!

Anyways, the point here being, Kyle Gabler was amazing enough to me beforehand and World of Goo has just made him that much more epic (but we love all of 2D Boy, especially Ron Carmel’s last name).

World of Goo!  I knew we’d get there sooner or later.

This game is genius.  Not to beat a dead horse or anything, but really, it is.  If you haven’t bought it or *at least* downloaded the demo to give it a go (I know people like this still exist, I already converted one), do it.  The controls are simple and smooth (hint: mouse + click + drag), the fourth wall is continuously and elegantly broken, the dialogue is witty, often satirical and all sorts of other favorable adjectives, and the art is gorgeous, cohesive and wonderfully stylized (now might be a good time to mention I’m not the biggest fan of realism in games).

But the gameplay!  There’s the real gem of it, and shouldn’t it be?  It is a game, after all.   The pacing is exquisite and keeps the entire thing enjoyable and refreshing (kinda like gooballs).  Every time the thought started to creep up in my head that the current mechanic (a certain type of gooball, variety of levels, etc.) was getting old, something new and different and perfectly at home popped in for a breather.  Rarely was anything impossibly challenging for more than a few hours of eye-bleeding monitor staring and never was something so easy that it felt boring or out-of-place.

It’s a short game (not so much for an indie title, I suppose), but it’s a perfect example of quality over quantity.  The replay value is still there, nothing is worn to death, and everything is polished and lovely.

I’m sure I left out some critiques of it (seeing as I haven’t written any down yet), but that’s because I forgot them all in a haze of glory and ponies.  Go buy it and figure out what you don’t like for yourself: it’ll probably be a short list.

I’m going to go bake a cake for 2D Boy now.  Next time I’ll be meaner, I promise.

Colossus!

I had my Zbrush class this quarter (awesome?  I think yes!), and our final was to build a creature that used a single shape as the basis for its primary, secondary and tertiary forms out of Zspheres, retopo and sculpt the thing, UV it, bake a map, and so forth.

So here’s what I currently have: the eventual plan is to keep working on the critter himself (I like to call him the tapirillepheline) and build a village on his back so I can still chalk it up as an environment later…  Eh, eh?

Progress on the temple that you guys haven’t heard of until just now

So I have a magical knack for vanishing into the real world (it’s terrible, I know).  But I brought presents!  Not gym memberships or health food or anything useless like that.  Oh no!  I brought back awesome stuff, cool stuff, totally sweet stuff that consumed my life for the past two and a half months with ruthless efficiency

Okay, that sentence is only true if you remove everything from “awesome” to “sweet”, but I’m working on making something those adjectives apply to.  In the meantime, you’ll have to put up with my work in progress…es.  God, what an awful word.

Anyways, this one is a temple based off of the Katrik Swami temple in Nepal.  At this point I’m mainly polishing up the building interior and exterior textures and starting to work on the surrounding environment.  Glee!