the net raiders

I was flipping through this  months issue of Play Magazine today when an a very short article about iPhone games caught my eye.

To The  Moon is the name of this puzzle game, in which you have to build bridges to reach the moon. Sound familiar? It might, especially if you’re familiar with a game called World of Goo.

World of Goo is an amazing puzzle game in which you are given an certain amount of goo balls to be used in the construction of a structure that must reach from point A to point B. As you progress throughout the game you are introduced to different types of goo balls that call for different strategies in order to reach your goal. At the end of each level you collect as many goo balls as you can. Once you have gathered the required number of goo balls required, you move on to the next level. You can go back and replay all the levels to get a better score.

The most amazing thing about this game though, aside from it’s unique visual style, is how it came into exsistence. Kyle Gabler and Ron Carmel are both ex-employees of EA, who decided to try a project now deemed “rapid game prototyping Experimental Gameplay Project” in which 11 games are made within 11 weeks. The games have a theme, Physics being the theme for World of Goo. What else is amazing is that the team only had 3 people working on it at it’s peak employment.

World of Goo won a bunch of awards and was eventually published for WiiWare, Windows, Mac and Linux operating systems. It caused a big stir in the media because of how many people pirated copies of it. The developers estimated that everyone 1 in 10 copies had been legitmately purchased, although the math is debatable since each user is allowed 3 accounts to play on.

Kyle Gabler wrote a long article about the process of “rapid game prototyping Experimental Gameplay Project”, and the idea is really catching on. The Art Institute in San Francisco is trying to host an 11 games in 11 weeks project for their Visual Game Programming and Game Art Design students in the fall quarter. It will be based around the same ideas that 2D Boy (the developers of World of Goo) used in their experiment.

If you haven’t checked out this game, I strongley suggest it. It’s fun and easy to learn, with a lot of replay-ability. If you don’t want to buy it, you can always check out the free demo from Big Fish Games until you’ve been convinced. Or check out To The Moon on your iPhone to get a small taste of the magical World of Goo.