How do you design a building when gravity can change at any time? Willy Chyr is figuring that out with his first game, Relativity. Think about it as if GLaDOS gave you control over gravity instead of portals (minus the evil AI narrative).
Somehow, Willy he decided that his first project should be a game where you can change gravity at will. A bit more ambitious than most people’s first projects, but the result is already looking fantastic. I played through an early alpha build and when I got the hang of switching gravity around, I felt the same excitement I had when I first started thinking with portals.
The basic idea is a straightforward puzzle game, built in an open world that you can navigate as you unlock portals to different areas. Many of the puzzles are already built, and some of them really mess with your head. Despite how the puzzles may have frustrated me, the mechanic itself feels surprisingly natural, thanks to the colour-coded gravity fields.
The final game is planned to have some type of narrative element that you can either investigate further, or ignore if you’re just into solving puzzles.
Check out the video above, where we talk about where the idea came from, how to design architecture for puzzles, and why one room is called the “Jerry Maguire puzzle”.
Relativity is coming to PC, Mac and Linux in early 2015.
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