For the past four months I have worked together with eight other students to create The Blob. The game is not finished yet, but we are getting close to the deadline. Because some issues still remain and I will ask those on the forum, I figured it would be nice to show what all those questions are about.
The Dutch city of Utrecht is having a great make-over of the city-centre during the coming 10 years and this game is to show the player how the city will look in ten years. In our game, the player has to paint the new city centre as it will be 10 years from now.
The player plays a ball of paint that rolls through the streets. When it rolls over a paint-character, it absorbs its colour and grows. This way the player can become different colours. With these colours the player can paint the buildings, trees and cars in the city. Cars only start driving when painted. The main goal of the game is to paint the 14 landmark buildings that each have small puzzles to accomplish this. Sub-goals of the game are to paint all other buildings and collect all hidden coins.
For technical stuff, we are using Ogre for graphics (of course), FMOD for audio and ODE for physics and collision detection. Interesting technical details:
-the ball is fully controlled by physics
-there are over 200 NPC's in the city
-most objects are seperately paintable, so that makes over a 1000 paintable objects in the level
-the ground is lit using pre-rendered lightmaps, rendered with VRay
-shaders give the ball and NPC's a funny look
-vertex shaders make the ball deform to make him look really squashy and fluid
-the game uses a custom hierarchical scene-exporter that is built on top of the MAXscript exporter and supports a lot of custom gameplay-objects.
I am the lead programmer on the team, which further features one other programmer, one audio designer, one level designer and five artists.
I hope a downloadable version of the full game will be available soon, but that depends on the client we are making this game for (the city of Utrecht). It will be playable in an information centre within a few weeks anyway for those who live in Utrecht.
