Facts
Project Title: Blob
Project Status: Completed
My Responsibilities: Everything
- Game Design
- Game Programming (C#, Torque X Engine)
- Art and Sound Creation
Project Description
Blob is a simple casual game, I developed as part of my master’s thesis. In Blob players have to pop as many colored bubbles (or Blobs, thus the name) as possible by touching them with their avatar. The player’s avatar is represented by a smaller blob and can be controlled either by mouse or by gaze. New Blobs in one of three colors (red, green, or blue) are constantly spawning at random positions on the screen and gradually rowing in size. If two or more Blobs collide with each other, the game is over. For gaze-based interaction, the exact screen position that the player is looking at at any given time is recognized by an eye tracker and the measured data is used to steer the player avatar.
There were two main motivations behind the development of Blob:
- Evaluate the effectiveness of the development and logging framework that I designed and implemented throughout my master’s thesis.
- Examine the suitability of different mouse- and gaze-based interaction modes for digital games.
The game, as well as the logging framework was developed in C# using the Torque X Engine and a number of additional third party software components to access and integrate MySQL databases and the specialized data collection hardware. If you are interested in those aspects, feel free to read my master’s thesis.
Game Details
The overall objective of Blob is quite easy: “Get your name on the highscore list!”. In order to achieve this goal, players have to adhere to the following four rules:
- Collect colored blobs by touching them with your avatar.
- The larger the blobs are that you collect, the more scores you get.
- The more blobs of the same color you have collected in a row before touching this one, the more score you get.
- If two or more blobs collide, the game is over.
Because new blobs are constantly spawning at random positions on the screen and the existing ones are gradually growing in size, the basic objective can be divided into the following subtasks:
- Navigate to the largest blob of the right color without colliding with blobs of the wrong color.
- Collect blobs before they collide and prevent you from getting more scores.
With these two subtasks in mind, the real objective of Blob can be described as “Plan the best path to collect the blobs as efficiently as possible in order to get your name on the highscore list!”.
