It’s main feature is a green glowing ball that squelches around a level. The ball is made gooey using a few hundred particles at each vertex on it’s surface. Each particle is physically simulated and tied by a virtual spring to every other particle. This gives the ball bounce, but is pretty computationally expensive.

Pictures do not give much of an idea of how it works, so have a look at this pair of videos:

Both these videos can be downloaded in much higher quality here (9.33MB) and here (19.4MB).

This is, of course, work in progress and I’m going to be adding more to it over time.

This actually works, though has a couple of usability issues. I’ll post the script itself later once I’ve fixed a couple of minor bugs. Edit: You can download it here.

I’d like to make it context sensitive too, so it shows searches that are relevant to where you are, but there really aren’t enough searches on the bbc website. The programmes guide has no way of filtering searches by genre etc, which would be required in order to do this.