MetaBall 2
The Four Seasons
2006 - 2007
MetaBall 2 is the sequel of the single player action/puzzle game: MetaBall. The basic style remains the same (collecting sun icons, saving Tinies and rolling around in a ball like crazy), but with a simple storyline and a more dynamic, living environment. Many ideas never made it to MetaBall 1, but hopefully they get implemented this time.
Like vehicles. MetaBall had some machines directly controlled by the player, but I'd like to take it further. On certain maps vehicles play a central role, and the player must master them to finish the map flawlessly.
The central location of the game is the Island of Four Seasons. The player will travel from one season to another by steam driven contraptions.
The game starts at the Plateau of Spring...
..and ends somewhere on the cold and windy Peaks of Winter. The player should take the ChainClimber to get up there.
The real purpose of the chains is something the have to investigate to him/herself.
The changing weather plays active part on the levels. Here is a short footage of our weather manager:
Weather matinee (12.5 Mb, Quicktime)
Wild creatures live on the islands. On certain maps they might provide invaluable help, if one pays attention to their behaviour.
This is a work in progress version of the Caveosaur:
There are also NPCs who the player can interact with, like the following fellow:
I've redesigned most of the balls, and there will be a few new one,
like
the chain ball.
I also unified the design of common game objects to make them more consistent with each other and with the world.
Player start, Balltar (for changing ball types) and the save pedestal for Tinies.
I were prototyping on the Unreal 3 engine. Even without a single line of metaball specific code I was able to make set up some gameplay, entirely in UnrealEd. You can see the map in the following movie clips:
Short version: Teaser. (11 Mb, Divx)
Long version: Walkthrough. (70 Mb, Divx)
Certain single player and all multiplayer maps will be in a 2D game mode, as seen in the following footage:
Basic 2D gameplay (22.7 Mb, Quicktime)
The shader architecture is pretty powerful, so I was able to create the skydome and the daily cycle in one shader. Here is a short matinee showing this feature:
Daily cycle matinee (4.9 Mb, Quicktime)
I'm modeling and texturing in modo, and using xNormal to bake high definition objects to low def ones:
Highres model in modo 202 -> Low-res model in Unreal 3
I create the textures in Paint Shop Pro, FilterForge and MapZone 2.5.
