GCG Feature: 'Student Postmortem: DigiPen's Toblo'

The latest feature for Gamasutra sister educational site Game Career Guide presents a postmortem of DigiPen Institute of Technology's Toblo, an original block-based CTF game which is a 2007 IGF finalist in both the Student Showcase and Design Innovation categories. An introduction to the Toblo postmortem explains the exact concept of the game and its genesis: "Going into junior year at DigiPen Institute of Technology, our team was looking to make a game that was both light-hearted and easy to pick up and play. Knowing we wouldn’t be working with any artists, we also wanted to craft a physics-based engine and keep our art asset requirements to a minimum. With these things in mind, the team sat down one night and hashed out our master plan over some burritos. That original meeting spawned a game design which eventually turned into Toblo. Our game consists of two teams battling each other for control of a completely destructible world made of blocks. The game places a strong emphasis on destroying your opponent’s base in order to capture all three of their flags. Players are essentially limited to two ways of interacting with the world: picking up blocks and throwing them. In order to attack other players, the blocks which make up the world must be used as weapons. This concept of the world as your ammo leads to tearing apart the level’s structures, such as walls and trees. At the end of a match, the level is left in a state of complete disarray. Several large piles of rubble mark where the two bases used to be." You can now read the full Game Career Guide feature on the subject, with more from the students concerning the development successes and difficulties that went into creating Toblo (no registration required, please feel free to link to this feature from external websites).