Worlf of Goo 2 (multiplayer)?

14 replies [Last post]
Joined: 04/17/2011

Hello, World!

Haven't been here for a while. I've been quite busy doing other stuff and found a different game for which to develop mods on; Don't Starve. However, Don't Starve is a game, which was intended to be single player and was announced by the company that it would not be made multiplayer. But, just a while later after the full release of the game's DLC, the game was announced to become multiplayer.

This got me thinking (now that I remember this game. I'm sorry I forgot about you guys <:( !); would it be possible to make WoG multiplayer? I mean, just having multiple cursors in each level, representing a player and the game being run on their own machine for each player (computer or whatever) but they are connected with a server, be it a dedicated server or a hosted one (2D Boy's servers). I know that a lot of code would need to be changed; the same happened with Don't Starve, and so to make things easier, Klei (the company that made that game) decided to make the multiplayer version a separate game; Don't Starve Together. And so, may be this could too be possible for Worlf of Goo, but as in having a completely "new game"? Imagine the possibilities; having levels specifically dedicated to multiplayer interaction, where each person has to do a certain job in order to get through a level, say first level being that there is the pipe on the right and your goo balls are on the left, but there is a spiky gap and you don't have enough goo balls to get enough through the pike whilst still making a bridge to reach the other end, so you would need each player to hold on to a goo ball and each releasing a goo ball near at the same time to make a bridge to the pipe and have enough to go through the pipe for finishing the level, kind of like when you play WoG on a touchscreen device and are able to hold multiple balls at the same time. And not only that, but this game could tell us a little more about the mysterious world of goo (no pun intended), just like Little Inferno did after World of Goo. Or perhaps it could be a DLC instead of a new game? But I think a new game would be much more feasable. And tbh, I think the reason why WoG kind of died down is BECAUSE of the lack of multiplayer.

Whether you think it's a good or a bad idea, either way, it's up to Ron and Kyle, but if this became a thing, I would pay all of the money I have stored up atm just to get my hands on it. But what DO you think?

PS: I would like to get on with my world of goo's custom world addin making, but idk where AP has gone, I haven't heard from him in ages, so AP, if you're there, I'd like to know what the heck's going on.

Joined: 09/01/2009

World of Goo already has multiplayer support on Linux and on Wii. It's not going to happen on other OSs. It's also not possible to mod in.

Joined: 04/17/2011

What?! Since when? And what was the point of doing that without new levels specifically dedicated to multiplayer interaftion? Is it server based? Also, why would I or anyone want to mod it/make an addin of it if it already exists?

And I'm guessing that because Windows support isn't prioritised is one reason why not as many people play this game anymore. WoG could become so much more than it is; the lore, the gameplay etc. Is there anything specific that is getting in the way of the progress, cause you're not really giving me much detail, MOM. And how does multiplayer work anyway?

Btw, do you know what's happened to AP? Has he left? It would be a shame if he has Sad

Joined: 08/06/2010

I still check in on the site, I'm just not very active here any more.

On the Wii version you can have up to four people, each with a remote, interacting with the Goo Balls independently. When the Linux version came out later they kept this feature in, so you can plug in additional mice and have other people help move the Goo Balls. There are a few levels on this site based on that mechanic.

And 2D Boy did add special features to the Windows version for the fans (e.g. passing a level name on the command line, which is what lets you launch levels from the editor). It's just been so long now that support for WoG on any platform isn't really a priority any more. I don't know if 2D Boy even still exists as a company per se.

Another Planet finally has an official release! Download chapters 1 through 3 here! Thank you for waiting so long while I kept starting over.

Joined: 04/17/2011

Well, what about my chapter? And YOUR chapters? Are you still working on them? Or have you stopped working on them completely?

And I don't understand; why and how did 2D Boy got so "lost" with their games? The idea of developing a lore with multiple games that are different types of genre is something fantastic and even World of Goo itself could have still been developed! And from what I understand, multiplayer only works locally and not online, right?

Joined: 08/06/2010

Yeah, I've pretty much stopped working on WoG stuff. Switching to a new computer messed up all my editors and tools, and I haven't had the motivation to start over and get all of those working again. I'd already used most of my ideas for AP also; there was one big mechanic I didn't get to (invisible friendly anchors, with a limited number of water-like Goo Balls which "open them up" for normal building; the puzzle is choosing the right place to use those) but other than that I'd done most of what I planned.

Another Planet finally has an official release! Download chapters 1 through 3 here! Thank you for waiting so long while I kept starting over.

Joined: 11/04/2008

Network multiplayer for a physics-simulation game is a very hard problem. You need every player's state to be exactly the same, but physics simulations are inherently lossy (simulation speed, integration, rounding errors etc), and even if you could afford the bandwidth to constantly transmit the entire simulation state, latency and jitter would make that very jerky. Don't really see it happening, at least with an off-the-shelf physics engine like ODE. Multiplayer games that do have physics tend to use them for unimportant stuff like rendering explosions, not for the core gameplay.

-davidc

Joined: 08/06/2010

Tying in with what davidc said: think of how WoG levels don't always start in the same state. Sometimes a Goo Ball will launch itself off a ledge, for example. Imagine if one player had that happen, but another didn't. Then the player who could still see the ball grabbed it. What should happen?

Another Planet finally has an official release! Download chapters 1 through 3 here! Thank you for waiting so long while I kept starting over.

Joined: 04/17/2011

@AP it would depend on what the server actually renders, because what client sees ins't always what the server renders, so if someone picks up a goo ball that didn't actually render to launch on the server, the goo ball would simply return to the state that the server rendered it to have, in this case moving the ball back to not being launched and vice versa. Don't think that I don't know how servers work, dude Tongue

This would be a lot of work to work through, so if Kyle and Gabriel did work on this, as I stated in the title, it'd be best to have it as a new game and perhaps a sequel to the lore of the first game and before Little Inferno timeline and so being an intermediate between Little Inferno and WoG in terms of lore, or have its lore set up after Little Inferno and so as you play the game you could find out what happened to the world that it froze but mainly how you can resolve it. So then it would add to the lore, be a great game and be something people would be very much interested in. Klei for instance did the same kind of thing with their game called Don't Starve (as I might have mentioned earlier) and so they made a separate game called Don't Starve Together for the sake of integrating multiplayer in.

Idk if Kyle and Gabriel are working on anything atm, but if they aren't then making a WoG 2 as a multiplayer type of game, with new levels specifically made for multiplayer interaction then it would be amazing. I'm really curious about the lore of WoG. I theorize that it's the WoG sunshine corporation (I think that's how they named it. And huh, I was planning on making a WoG corporation sunshine addin at some point, so perhaps they got the idea from me?) that made the world freeze so that they could sell Little Inferno fireplace to the people across the world for profit. Makes sense, right?

Joined: 08/06/2010

I wasn't thinking of a client/server model per se, more like a peer-to-peer thing. Less overhead that way and you don't have to rely on a central service to play the game.

Canon-wise, why do you say WoG and LI are in the same universe? I didn't see any real indication of that though I never got as much into LI as WoG.

Another Planet finally has an official release! Download chapters 1 through 3 here! Thank you for waiting so long while I kept starting over.

Joined: 04/17/2011

Albino Pokey wrote:
I wasn't thinking of a client/server model per se, more like a peer-to-peer thing. Less overhead that way and you don't have to rely on a central service to play the game.

Canon-wise, why do you say WoG and LI are in the same universe? I didn't see any real indication of that though I never got as much into LI as WoG.

1) The artstyle is the same
2) The Sunshine Corporation is most likely the rebuilt WoG Corporation. I will eat a pack of tissues if they're not the same corporation, just in the future/past or a replacement corporation.

I watched Jacksepticeye play through Little Inferno and so I can confirm these points.

And, what? There's a non-centralized connection system? How does it work?! I'm an Ancom and I would love to find out about this; because it's decentralized! I didn't know that peer-to-peer or whatever existed!

Joined: 10/09/2012

lol, jacksepticeye is awesome

Joined: 04/17/2011

Question; are Kyle and Gabriel still working on indie games? Or are WoG and Little Inferno all they'll be making? Because a multiplayer WoG would be amazing as WoG 2.

In terms of Peer to peer though; wouldn't that be quite troublesome and wouldn't it be easier to set up server-client connections?

EDIT: wow, what's with the Tomorrow Corporation thing? Aren't Kyle and Gabriel known as 2D Boy, or did they change their title? Or does one have 2D Boy and the other has Tomorrow Corporation?

Joined: 10/09/2012

They just released a new game called "Human Resource Machine", MOM4Evr will tell you about it soon. Also, Kyle is working with tomorrow corporation, so technically yes they aren't using the name 2D Boy anymore

Joined: 09/01/2009

Yeah, they split. Kyle is off with Tomorrow Corporation with Kyle Gray and Allan Blomquist, their most recent game is Human Resource Machine (Super awesome!). Ron is off working with Noel Llopis, they just released a mobile game called Subterfuge.

Links/info: http://goofans.com/blog/201510/two-new-games-coming-october-15th

*cough*readthenewsitemsonthefrontpage*cough*