Primordial Ooze: World Of Goo Prototype

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.

Ron Carmel explains,

"for a while now we’ve been meaning to post some early childhood snapshots of world of goo, to dig deep into our code repository and remember the good ol’ days. the early part of a game’s development is often very enjoyable because things evolve rapidly and there’s a great sense of accomplishment. it’s also a lot of fun to look back at those early days and laugh at what the game use to look and feel like. before all the levels, before all the polish, before the months of bug fixing, there was this."

Let's try to ignore the background, as it's just plain weird. (And let's hope Fox ignores it too.) The balls will bond with each other, meaning you can build a basic tower, but they'll also do some extremely odd things. You can pick up the whole structure and fling it around in excited circles, watching the physics work really rather well. Until suddenly they pop out of existence, or fling off into some unreachable realm. They also stick to the background in peculiar ways, letting you make some deeply odd shapes. It's ugly and simple (the RPS Way), but you can see the idea in there. Hopefully iterations 2 through 7 will be appearing soon.