Black Phillip
A Journey Through Hell
By John Alkire
Upon returning to hell after terrorizing a colonial American farm, Black Phillip realizes his life has been losing its sense of meaning lately. The player, as Phillip, must traverse through hell to find meaning. As with most things in life, Phillip finds that search is best completed with friends.
Gameplay
Black Phillip is best understood as soccer, except with mouths instead of goals and three gems instead of one ball. One to four players compete to knock the most gems into their teams’ respective mouths, subtly denoted by hellish color-coded symbols. While mouse and keyboard work for one player games, the full multiplayer experience requires a gamepad for each player.
Results
Technologies
Black Phillip implements a cosmic swath of graphics technologies. Here’s the deets:
- Deferred rendering
o The most useful technology to implement. Though the game doesn’t make terribly great use of this feature, it was profoundly helpful in better understanding the entire graphics pipeline.[i]
- Particles for fire
o The most beautiful effect. Fire colors are determined based on the “life” of each particle in the particle system. It was difficult to balance performance with beauty.[ii]
- Bloom
o Really draws the user’s eyes to the most important parts of the game: the team symbols, the mouths, and the gems. Oh yeah, and the goat heads.[iii]
- Shadow mapping
o The compromise between performance and good looks: only goats have shadows.[iv]
- Splitscreen
o If you want multiplayer, you may have to completely overhaul your software design. Have to keep track of camera positions, movement input, player locations, etc in a way that can be scaled to x number of players.
- Articulated character motion
o We all did this in 471.
- Third person camera
o The goat only changes the direction it faces when you start moving, Just Cause 2 style. This allows for both dramatic camera shots and tight gameplay.
- Audio effects
o FMOD makes this easy.[v]
- View frustum culling
o A nice performance gain, but literally no visual evidence. Is it even in the game? (it is.)[vi]