The Uncontrollable Gooey Blob (Proof of Concept)

Here is a proof of concept for one of the possible control methods for the game I'm working on. It's just a single screen and there is no game concept in the demo.

Download file (161kb)

Please feel free to comment, especially regarding the controls.

Seems pretty controllable to me although not so easy to get past those rockets :) Good work!

You doing a Gish clone?

Stevie

That's fun, maybe the whole blob should rotate when you move, though.

Yes, a bit more animation when just moving left and right would look much better.

Possible something similar. I'm still toying with different ideas at the moment. It may eventually go in a very different direction.

Do you mean the face? The whole blob does rotate when moving it's just not too noticable because he's all one colour.

My intention is to have lots of different expressions that the blob will make when doing various things. My plan is to make him as emotive, and therefore loveable, as possible.

Funny! Ignoring the visuals (it hurts!) it's nice to see Mr. Gooey "adapt" to different surfaces. Could be a wonderful game! Played with a Rumblepad this could be intense gameplay ;)

Jake

Nice physics. Nice physics dont make a game, though. :)

You cant jump while on the bridge, BTW.

It's pretty interesting. I find the movement to be a bit on the slow side and the jumping is not really high enough. It also seems a bit easy to get stuck not being able to jump over things - like on the rope bridge thing, seems impossible to jump from it. But otherwise it's pretty interesting how it moves. Just needs a more polished graphics style. Could be the basis of a pretty interesting game. I am wondering how you can leverage the fact that he is gooey to have a bearing on how he solves puzzles and gets through the level, rather than just simply being that he's a slow not-very-bouncy character with a wiggle body?

haha thats really cool :D

I wouldn't know where to start coding such a thing!

Hey! What's wrong with the visuals? That's some of my best artwork :)

Agreed. Hopefully I'll get the gameplay right as well though.

That is a symptom of the physics. The jump is in fact just the blob puffing up for a split second to become solid. This means that when he's against an immovable object he'll jump. However when he's against a movable odject, like the bridge, they share the force. This is also compounded by the fact that he becomes soft again and this absorbs some of the force. To be honest I like the fact he reacts differently when on different surfaces.

Interestingly enough I originally had him moving faster and jumping higher. The final speed will be dictated by which direction I take the game in. If it's an out and out puzzler he'll be quite slow. If I go in a more platformy route he'll carry a lot more speed. What do others make of his speed?

I just started by making a 2D verlet physics module.

Hey thats pretty cute. I like it! A wholesome blobby guy rolling (or blobbing) around. Neat proof of concept!!

That is really neat, is he going to be able to be made solid as in frozen and alike or melt if a level is too hot....lol....what other things can or will the character be able to do....?I like it though.

Very good!!

Nice, you might want to consider sphere mapping a texture to the blob. I've some sphere mapping code for my textured poly module it you want it.

I'm still just feeling things out at the moment so not going to rule anything out. I'll be trying various things out and keeping in anything that works well.

Not thought too much about the visuals just yet, as you can probably tell. I'd be very interested trying your sphere mapping code as he does need a bit of definition.

hehe thats funny

powered by physmax ??

Pretty cool stuff man. At one point the rocket got stuck in me, but i shook 'im off ;o)

Really nice. Like locoRoco for PSP. Maybe you sould let him roll as standatd moving.

It's a physics module I've made for BlitzMax. There's a few posts about it, not got the links handy though.

Really! Maybe the blob was hungry. In the film he eats everything in sight so I'd say you were lucky :)

I've never played it so I'll take your word for it.

Thanks for all the positive comments guys. It's very encouraging. Just what I needed.

I love this, but I didn't get the source code in my download.

I like making him jump and wobble.

Nevermind. Feel free to have the media though. I think blue and orange polygons are gonna be all the rage this summer.

When the blob is totaly on a knocked down Rocket, left and right shouldnot make the rocket go left and right.

For true Gishness :

' works in world space and object space BUT don't mix!
' pass co-ordinates and the texture co-ordinates will be returned
' x#,y# = vertex co-ordinate
' midx#, midy# - center of object - maybe attach this to a spring!
' u#, v# - texture co-ordinates returned by function

Function SphereMap(x#,y#, midx#=0, midy#=0,u# Var,v# Var)
	Local xd# = x - midx
	Local yd# = y - midy 
	Local Mag:Double = Sqr(xd*xd + yd*yd)
	xd = xd / mag
	yd = yd / mag
	u =  xd/2 + 0.5
	v =  yd/2 + 0.5
End Function

That's easily remedied by giving the rockets more friction. I gave them such low friction for the demo so I could push them around easier to try different things out.

@Indiepath: Cheers for the code Tim I'll give it a try tomorrow.

I cannot understand why the demo is so slow (and FPS seems to be very low). Maybe it's windowed mode problems?

Upd: found the reason of slowdown - traffic counter (DUTraffic) and file donloader (FlashGet). Hmm...

About demo: interesting! There are some glitches in curve generating. And jumping mechanism is different from Gish's (they seems just to force base circles to form triangle or something). It's funny to kick rockets with this "pumping" jump!

The visuals were low down on the list when I made this POC. Check out the new demo for a slight, and I mean slight, improvement. Oh no! More gooey goodness

I'm not attempting to emulate Gish so that's to be expected. I don't actually remember much about how Gish controlled as it's been so long since I tried it. I just remember you could stick to walls. Could Gish jump?

Discovered the origin of slowdown (will post it in Bug Reports section).


That's excellent, I just point on it to compare.


Yes (and also can duck to jump then higher). Also it can stick to surfaces, strain (to add weight and resist squashing) and become slippery (to pass through narrow shafts).

Jumping system there is not just adding force up, so if you jump from inclined surface or corner, Gish will fly along diagonal in example.

Another cool feature there is rope that can connect objects and can be broken if strain reaches certain threshold.