MetaBall 2 - The four seasons

[2006 - 2007]

MetaBall 2 is the sequel of the single player action/puzzle game: MetaBall. The basic design 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 player have to investigate for him/herself.

The changing weather plays active part on the levels. Here is a short footage of the weather manager:

Weather matinee (12.5 Mb, Quicktime)

I’ve redesigned most of the balls, and there will be a few new one, like the chain ball.

New enemies include the MeatBalls who try to kidnap the Tinies captured in a ball, unless the SpikyBall stops the wrongdoing:

I 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)

The shader architecture is pretty powerful, so I made 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: