Spire of Ooze

Hi all. I became the latest victim of the credit crunch today. The firm I work for went bust leaving me jobless. So to cheer myself up I made a Tower of Goo clone as a homage to the best game of the past year, World of Goo. It's called Spire of Ooze, and it's written in BlitzMax using my PhysLite module. It took me about three hours start to finish, including media. Leave any feedback you want, but I won't be adding to it as 2D Boy already perfected the genre. Enjoy!


Click for screenshot

Download Spire of Ooze (781KB)

Just click on the screen to add 'ooze', and click on blobs of 'ooze' to remove them. The window can be resized, and the screen can be scrolled by moving the cursor near the top or bottom of the window. The idea is to to make the tallest 'spire' you can, but there's no completion or highscore so make up any goal you want.

Cool program, I was trying to get it to fall off the little pillar of land.

Sorry about your job though...

Simple but fun :)

Nice little program, to bad that is only for BlitzMax, not for B3D.

hmmm thats pretty cool!

@sauer I dont think you can get it to fall off the land because the bottom two dots are ancored down

Ahhhh I see...

I still want to try.

clever! I was never a fan of the tower of goo gameplay, but the physics here is really solid. Next time I've got a bit of cash I might buy physlite, I've got a few ideas hanging around that need competent physics.

yeh the physics are good,

does the game work like this...

the joints rotate when they have a certain amount of force/weight on them?

well i built a very unstable tower and the top half spun to face the bottom so i guess so ;)

Thanks for the comments. It was just a little bit of fun to cheer myself up. Tower/World of Goo is one of the games I'd wish I'd made. The coding couldn't be simpler. I was able to knock up a prototype in a couple of hours, but it just shows that an awesome concept makes all the difference. If only I could think up original concepts of my own I'd be laughing.

Nate the Great wrote:
Yep. Any 'ooze' that hits the ground sticks to it. No real reason why I made it that way, I just did.

Jeremy Paxman - Yeeeeeeeees wrote:
Not quite. The constraints are springs and they are set fairly stiff. However, if there is enough weight/force on them they'll compress and then flip around causing your carefully constructed 'spire' to collapse.

Good stuff! Has a nice World of Goo feel to it :D

you currently can pack them very dense though -- it's was pretty easy to get up to 2300 in no time flat just by putting a ton of dots close together in a big 's'-shape, repeating layer after layer.

Although once it does start swingingat that point there's not much you can do about it anymore...

Anyway, looks interesting.
Good luck with the job hunt. :-?

Sorry to hear about your job. It's going on a lot. How about going Indie? If you are that good a programming (3 hours) you could make a good go of it"

Turn it into a world of goo clone and maybe sell it, you could do this with maybe another twenty hours of work? (in order to add levels and polish to graphics and physics).
Use your spare time constructively.

Really sorry to hear about your job. I still haven't found another one. Great little game though!

xlsior wrote:Yep, it's fairly easy if you pack the blobs densely. World of Goo stops you having crossed goo strands which would help increase the difficulty. Might go back to this one day and tidy it up.

Greay Alien wrote:It's not the best time to be looking for a job. I applied for one job and the women said they'd had over a thousand applicants, and it was only for casual work. Not sure I'd cut it as an indie developer. I've been a bit devoid of original ideas for a while now, and I wouldn't be able to go the casual route. I may give it a go whilst I'm out of work, but I certainly won't be relying on it.

andy_mc wrote:World of Goo has an 80% piracy rate on the pc so I'd be taking a tiny slice of an already small pie. Besides, World of Goo is so good nobody would bother looking for an alternative.

team up with warpy if you need ideas.

Sorry about your job, hope you find something in time.
All your small games are really nice though and show your PhysLite very well!

Really nice little game. Just make the tower fall off screen already for Christ sake!!! :D

About the piracy rate of Tower of Goo, I'm pretty sure that it's not just a matter of thinking "this people wouldn't buy the game anyway".

I live in Brazil. Unfortunately here, most home users are "used to" downloading pirated software. When I said to some of my workmates that I have paid for my software licenses some of them frowned and were surprised by my attitude.

Indeed, in some places, people are used to doing it the easier way. My OS is OEM and here's a small list of the software I bought and use with pride:

Blitzbasic
Blitz3D
BlitzMax and MaxGUI (recently)
Multimedia Fusion 1 & 2
FL Studio XXL
Purebasic

I love and use all of them so why not pay the makers? Community and free updates are really good value.

And I remember there was a time when internet was not popular and you bought a software and that was it. No updates, no support besides the manual, no community, no tutorials. You were all by yourself.

Sorry for the rant. :/

I'm cleaning these demos up for inclusion in PhysLite v1.12 so I thought I'd pop back and update the download.

Download Spire of Ooze (781 KB)

Have fun.

Whats your highest score? 1476 on my first go

update 1595 getting better

Pete Carter wrote:So it's a good old fashioned goo building contest you're after. I think I'd be at an unfair advantage as I know how the internals work, but the highest I've seen by others so far is approx. 4,000.

oh

Pete Carter wrote:Hehe. You get a little help at about 2k ;)

are you going to be making any more little games?

Jeremy Paxman - Yeeeeeeeees wrote:Probably at some point. Im concentrating on the next PhysLite update at the moment and there may be a full game in the works, but I enjoyed [pun]blitzing[/pun] out these prototypes so I'd definately be up for another mini-gameathon at some point.

I still think its screaming out for a Worms clone ;OP

Heh, I like this. Also sorry to hear about your job, hope it all works out...

I managed to get mine to fall off the land by erm, having it topple over the edge and then removing the nodules that were at the original base. I liked the 'splat' sound. Heh-heh!