Gravity Distortion Factory

Controls

Main Menu

• Mouse-click the button either to start the game or to open the toybox

Puzzles

• Left-click to place a black gravity well
• Right-click to place a white antigravity well
• R to restart the level
• Enter to continue once you've beaten the level

Toybox

• Hold left-click to spawn physics objects
• Hold right-click to make the mouse an antigravity well
• Hold middle-click to make the mouse a gravity well
• R to restart the level
• Mouse-click the button to return to the main menu

Jam & Theme

This game was made in under 3 hours for TriJam 52.

The theme was: Fun with physics!

Development

I made the TriJam Discord for this TriJam, but that's obviously not a game and not really physics-related. I as always wanted to make more than one submission and had several ideas for a few projects, but I got busy with other things and otherwise procrastinated the day away, so there was only 5 hours remaining in the jam when I finally started on this.

I followed the tutorial for physics in GameMaker, as I had never really seriously touched the GMS2 physics system before and didn't understand it. I found the tutorial exceedingly quick, easy, and enlightening, and the game pretty much fell out of this tutorial basically fully formed. I really love the GMS2 physics system now, as this game honestly has such little code, it's all just applying the physics system. After finishing the tutorial, I stopped and made some food and ate for over a half hour.

I made the tutorial section into the toybox, and made a quick system of like 12 lines of code, each 6 lines being a barely-altered copy-paste of the other 6 lines, to spawn black wells and white wells which attracted and repelled dynamic physics objects in the simplest manner. It would have been better to make it so the impulse of the wells scaled with distance and had a dropoff-rate, but I wanted to zoom through to give the game sounds and a handful of levels.

I literally just hit randomize in sfxr a few times to generate the sound effects, and threw together a super generic crappy music track in FL. The levels were haphazardly thrown together in GMS2's Room Editor very easily. The codebase is rather disgusting for this project, with lots of copy-pasted code between object files, but this was one of the easiest TriJam games I've done. The whole game just kinda made itself. I probably spent the most time of the stupid, very unnecessary main menu gimmick at the beginning, which I just felt like doing.

All assets were made by me during the jam, except the star texture which I downloaded as part of the GMS2 physics tutorial haha!