Cosmic Osmo

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Cosmic Osmo and the Worlds Beyond the Mackerel is a graphic adventure computer game for the Macintosh computer line (Plus, SE, SE/30, II Series, Classic, LC) created by Cyan, Inc.. It was published in 1989 and won the 1990 Mac User award.

Cyan's game The Manhole, Cyan's first project, was a precursor to Cosmic Osmo.

1 Game mechanics
2 Goals and artistic design
3 Music and sound
4 Development
5 System requirements (CD-ROM Version)
6 See also
7 External links

[edit] Game mechanics

The game features a point and click interface. The player clicks on various elements on a scene to trigger events. To move between scenes and rooms, the player clicks on doors or near the edge of the screen.

The game begins when the player clicks on the animated spaceship hovering in front of the title screen, revealing an opening door on the side of the ship. Clicking the door makes the player enter the ship. While inside the ship he can trigger various events.

The spaceship gives the player the ability to visit various planets, it is equipped with two cotton swab cannons. Aside from using the ship to move between planets, a complicated network of shortcuts exists between planets and scenes. The game being presented in first person view, enables shifts from the macroscopic to the microscopic level. Most of the shortcuts are found at the microscopic level, through a water drain or a mouse hole for example.

[edit] Goals and artistic design

There is no goal in Cosmic Osmo, no points, nothing that the player can keep in an inventory. There is no way to finish the game, since it has no end.

Despite being advertised as a children's game, people from all ages could enjoy it at the time. It has a very humorous tone to it, and popular culture references abounds. It's also obviously influenced by Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

The graphics are 1-bit and use a lot of dithering patterns to simulate grayscale. Still, many of the scenes are very well drawn and are hand painted with the 9" compact Apple Macintosh screen in mind. Animations are very smooth even on these machines.

[edit] Music and sound

The game features digitized voices and sounds that were played by HyperCard's sound commands, and 18 tracks of original Red Book Audio background music on the CD-ROM version, much of which was written by Shep Lovick.

[edit] Development

Cosmic Osmo was created by brothers Rand and Robyn Miller, who went on to form the company Cyan and develop the best-selling adventure game Myst.

It was created, and runs, using HyperCard. Animated portions were made using MacroMind VideoWorks, a linear animation program that later became Macromedia Director. A XCMD plug-in enabled VideoWorks animated sprites to be displayed with an alpha mask on top or behind HyperCard's graphic layer.

As it was one of the first CD-ROM games, Cyan also offered a floppy disk version that didn't include background music. For those who didn't have a CD-ROM drive, the floppy version offered fewer planets to explore and required a hard drive for installation.