de Blob was constructed by eight students of Game Design and Development at the Utrecht School of the Arts (HKU) and one student of Informatics at the University of Utrecht, commissioned by the information centre for Utrecht’s railway station area. During the course of the next fifteen years, this area (which comprises the central railway station, the Utrecht Trade Mart and Hoog Catharijne shopping centre) is to be entirely renovated. Some of the existing roads are to be turned into waterways, a new station is to be built, a cinema, a casino, and all sorts of other amenities. With a view to informing everyone on what it is going to look like, we were commissioned to make a game, which takes place in the new station area and therefore generates life there.
This is what is known as de Blob, a game in which one rolls through Utrecht of the future as a sort of paintball. You can absorb paint figures, to mix colours which are used to paint the city. Almost everything can be painted: buildings, cars, trees and the paint trail that you leave behind as you go. The game play entails various aspects: you can simply paint the city; try to solve the puzzles for the seventeen main buildings, which enables you to paint them; or you can join the quest to find the fifty coins concealed throughout the city.
The game is primarily intended to run in an info centre, and therefore for people who are not really dedicated gamers, but people who play for five minutes before proceeding on their way once more. The coins are concealed in the game in order to attract the true gamers, as they are particularly difficult to both find and collect. Control is at its best for those who have a decent track ball, however, the game can also be played perfectly using a mouse.
The game was built using the engines Ogre for graphics, FMOD for audio and ODE for physics and collision detection. The tools used include 3D Studio MAX for modeling and level design, Photoshop for textures and Reason and Sound Forge for audio.
It was extremely good fun to take part in this project. The nine of us were assigned to create a game, and we were allocated our own classroom, where we spent some twenty to thirty hours each week building it. We were granted a great deal of freedom, which allowed us to really let our imaginations run free.
For four months last year, Studentteam Banana Games has been developing a game as part of a school project for Utrecht city centre development: de Blob. de Blob is now complete, and can be downloaded free of charge. We therefore hope that a lot of school project participants will play the game and try it out!
de Blob - Dutch version, 97 MB
de Blob - English version, 97 MB
de Blob - Dutch version, 97 MB - MIRROR 1
de Blob - English version, 97 MB - MIRROR 1
The minimum system requirements to play de Blob properly are a 1.5 GHz processor and 512 MB RAM. The video card installed is not of huge importance for the frame rate.
Would you like to respond to our game, then you may choose to do so in the topic about de Blob on gathering.tweakers.net. However, you are also welcome to send an e-mail to Joost van Dongen at tsgoo@hotmail.com.
de Blob has been nominated for both the Independent Games Festival Student Competition and the Slamdance Guerrilla Gamemaker Competition.
de Blob has already been reviewed on various sites. Below is a list of the most interesting reviews:
Gold Award on GameTunnel.com
A review on Fun-Motion.com
‘Premio Editor’ award on uptodown.com
