Plan for David Myers

21-6 does GiD

A good chunk of the 21-6 team attended this year's IGC, and one of the interesting takeaways from the event was the idea of 21-6 working as a team during a Game In a Day. The thinking was that we could work on prototyping a game idea, and unlike our works-in-progress we didn't have to worry about production-ready code or assets - just have some fun cranking on a game idea. And this is a summary of sorts of that experience.

Orbz really started off more like a golf game in design when we initially started working on it two years ago. You could argue that some of the design elements in Orbz actually lend themselves better to a golf-like game than to Orbz itself. We still want to make that game sometime in the future, and what better way to prototype the idea than to participate in the GiD? So, we asked for volunteers from the 21-6 team and tossed around some ideas in the team forums about what to include in Orbz Golf. When Saturday rolled around, we dumped the current Orbz 3 codebase into a new CVS repository in preparation for our hackery and away we went.


What IS Orbz Golf anyway?

We always have had a rough idea of what could go into an Orbz Golf game, and we several times had written up a short bullet-point list of possible features. In a nutshell, Orbz Golf was supposed to be a mix of traditional golf, miniature golf, and whatever oddness we could throw in that would be cool. We wanted a hole, a course, and par. We wanted you to take your time and make strategic shots, taking into account hazards, wind, and club selection. We liked the idea of making it quirky and cartoony, much like a mini-golf game would be, but using the first/third-person camera view that we already had in Orbz. And we wanted to play around with the concept of introducing characters into the game.

Meet the Orbz

Club selection is an important part of any traditional golf game, and we had a couple of ideas how to address this in OG. In Orbz you can pick up powerups that then can be used to give you special abilities or affect your opponents to your advantage. One idea that we latched on to for OG was to combine the idea of club selection and powerups. Each orb would look unique and would have its own characteristics, and you would choose an orb to use out of your virtual golf bag on each shot based on the situation. One of the first things we had Matt Mittman tackle on Saturday was creating some orbz with character. The idea was not just to have each orb look unique, but to also include its own facial characteristics. We wanted some facial animations, also, but ran out of time. So, without further ado, meet the Orbz!


Normal orb is just that - no special characteristics, except it has the longest range of any orb in the GiD version of OG. Sticky orb has less range, primarily due to the fact that instead of rolling or bouncing upon collision with something it instead sticks, even to the side of a tree or building. And Cursed orb has the shortest range of the three orbz, but this allows it to more readily ignore high winds or low gravity on the course. We had planned on a few more orb types, but twenty-four hours go by so damned quick we were happy with the three we got in.

What's on the Course?

We wanted to give the guys making the courses some fun toys, including the more traditional (like wind) and the more zany (like a giant oscillating fan or tornado). We were able to add in some moving platforms that the guys used as hazards in some of the levels. We added in support for physical zones that could then be used for things like the giant fan and tornados, which do pretty obvious things to your orb if you manage not to avoid them. We added in a physical zone that essentially put the brakes on your orb, too, but we didn't have enough time to create a dif for them so they would be visible. This means we only used them for GiD in a couple of places - and not as hazards you could've seen and avoided like it was meant to be. We also reused some elements from Orbz, like the accelerators and teleporters.



You guys made how many courses?

We really thought we'd end up with three courses at the end of the weekend, and that would've been plenty. Chris, Kevin, and Dave were absolutely crazy, however, and managed to crank out eleven courses before it was all said and done. They also managed to create whole new themes just for the GiD, including Chris's pirate ships, Kevin's volcano, and Dave's office equipment. It was a lot of fun to see what they would come up with next as the weekend progressed.



Some music and user interface work to top it off

Matt Sayre created us a bouncy little tune for OG which really seemed to fit the theme of the game and he did it in record time. We added new UI elements to keep track of your score, par for the hole, and a pin indicator. We also added in a wind direction and speed indicator and finally an orb selection viewer.



24 Hours is TOO SHORT!

Ooh, boy, is that an understatement. We had thoughts of getting improved physics into OG, for instance. Mike merged the ODE physics engine into OG, but we simply did not have enough time to wire it up to the orbz. We also wanted to play around with some cool camera movements, like maybe using spline paths and such, but again we ran out of time. We got finished with the hazards pretty late in the weekend, which didn't really give the guys working on the levels much time to play around with them.

It was a lot of hard work, but we had a blast. Sometimes it's just fun to back away from the production lifecycle and prototype. To top it off, although our final product for GiD is by no means what we would expect of a finished product, it definitely gives us a glimpse of what Orbz Golf could become. And it is looking like it could be a very fun game with just enough innovation to make it stand out from the crowd. Who knows, maybe we'll see it in 2005? ;)

21-6 Team GiD:

Chris Brethen
Dave Calabrese
Justin Mette
Ryan Mette
Matt Mittman
Dave Myers
Mike Nelson
Kevin Ostrowski
Matt Sayre