Bowling Ball of God is a game created by Kevin Li and Evan Mullinix. The game uses ODE, SDL, and Nest.
The point of the game was to give the user a lot of power, but in a somewhat chaotic form. The physics engine allows the player to experience unexpected consequences.
We used some of the code from previous games/graphics to render the game. We adapted the code from the Block class from Topple. For ODE, we use a lot of ball joints for the wrecking ball. A lot of that code was adapted from Al's Programming resource and the ODE Wiki.
As said in the goal, one of the novelties is the physics engine itself because nothing in the game is scripted. The point of the game is to destroy the blue(ish) buildings without destroying the red ones. So while it's pretty easy and fun to just destroy buildings, you are forced to restrain yourself a bit since the wrecking ball is unwieldy.
The game definitely achieves our basic goals and it's pretty fun to play/watch. We would've liked to have had time to optimize the code so that the game will run faster and we could make more blocks. Different shapes of buildings and more complex levels/textures would also have been fun but we're fairly happy with the result as is. An ending condition that doesn't involve the game freezing might be nice as well but hey, at that point, you've already been thoroughly entertained.