Rock, Paper, Shotgun

As expected, 2D BOY have published details of their World Of Goo First Birthday experiment. Offering the game for whatever price people wanted to pay (previously it was $20), this meant people could get a copy for as little as $0.01 or as much as fifty million squillion space dollars. (I believe that’s the upper limit.) Originally this was intended to last for a week, but has now been extended to 25th October. And being a rather open sort they’ve announced how many copies they’ve sold so far, and indeed how much people have been paying, along with much more. It’s an unprecedented amount of detailed sales information. Its significance shouldn’t be underplayed.

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Via Offworld we notice that 2D Boy have released a “not-revolutionary” Rapid Prototyping Framework, to help other would-be devs on their way. This gives you a trimmed down version of the tools 2D Boy used to make World Of Goo. 2D Boy explain:

This means two things:

1. Minimizing the amount of code required to set up a new game
2. Providing all the basic facilities so as to avoid wasting time reinventing the wheel (2D rendering, sound, input, persistence layer, and resource management)

Which is probably quite neat, if you’re wanting to make a 2D game from scratch.

2D BOY are offering a really interesting glimpse into the process World of Goo went through, on its way to become the cuddly bundle of ludicrous loveliness that made us crack our ears with smiling last year. These will apparently be in seven stages, and the first is available to download from their site today. It’s a single room, containing some very primitive goo balls, which begin to show some of the characteristics that would form the final game.

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Mr Kyle Gabler, who apparently made something called World of Goo, has posted on the 2D BOY blog his first night keynote speech at the Global Game Jam 2009. Immediately leap below to see his guide to a group of people attempting to make a game in 48 hours.

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In good good news news, 2D BOY have released the soundtrack to World of Goo. Anyone who has played the game will know what a fantastic score the game has, and quite how sickeningly talented Kyle Gabler is to have written it all himself. What price would you pay for the lot? Well, it’s free.

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Just a quickie – my interview with the lovely chaps at 2D BOY is up on Eurogamer today. We discuss how the game got made, the reasons behind some of the more esoteric decisions, and learn some important facts about the mysterious Allan Blomquist. It’s a fun time.

The post yesterday reporting World of Goo’s 90% piracy figure drew a surprising response. The P-word regularly generates comments threads that scare our hosts, but this one was odd. It became a discussion about whether one could disprove the 90% figure, and then extrapolating this to reach peculiar conclusions. Some could see this as people claiming there were far fewer stab wounds than first predicted and therefore there hadn’t been a murder. Others might suggest that fighting over the exact number is completely irrelevant, as that’s not the point of the issue. Now 2D BOY have responded with new look at the figures.

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Updated below.

Good news, Euro-people. World of Goo is officially reaching our shores this December. Now, obviously you’re sensible enough to have bought the game directly from the 2D BOY site, so haven’t had to wait. But you might know someone silly enough to have not done that for some stupid reason, and now you can let them know the news.

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We’ve had a few people contact us regarding World of Goo’s sudden unavailability on Steam for European customers, so this is just a quick post to explain what we know. The game, which yesterday went straight to the top of Steam’s top sellers chart, has different publishers in the US and UK for the boxed versions. The US boxed game is available now, while the EU box won’t be appearing until around February 2009. There appears to have been some confusion regarding the contracts here, which 2D BOY are looking into. In the meantime, European customers can buy the game directly from 2D BOY with no problems whatsoever (and then just mount it in Steam, for goodness sakes).

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World of Goo launches today. In fact, if you look at the 2D BOY website, it seems to have quietly launched already. Buy! It will also be appearing on Steam, Direct2Drive, Greenhouse, and Beanstalk as the day goes on.

Despite their crazy pre-launch weekend, 2D BOY’s Kyle Gabler and Ron Carmel generously spared some time to answer our questions about the process of developing the game, the complicated life of the independent developer, and why it’s so very important to care deeply about your game (rather than your cat).

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