Game Concept

Gravity Bender (working title)

What if there was a platformer without the ability to jump? Instead relying on changing the direction of gravity to manuver the player around all sorts of obsticles and challenges!

Genre: (puzzle) platformer

The concept of gravity bender was formed when I was playing some js13k games, (The Colorful Journey & Vertex Connector in particular) and begun to wonder how I could make a simple and fairly easy to build game that is filled with depth, thus the idea of changing gravity as a mechanic was born. I then used subtractive design to experiment with cutting out the ability to jump to account for how broken jumping and gravity changing would be which worked out very well, I then removed movement to see how well that'd work with just gravity changing as the only movement option, but I found the game to be very easy to break and not very enjoyable when you can basically just fly around stages with gravity changing, so I added movement back in and limited gravity changing to just inverting the gravity, though after a while I realized I had just created VVVVVV and it wouldn't be as fun if it was just that, so I added the ability to change gravity horizontally as well to spice things up.

The game is targeted to mostly boys of all ages, with boys 10-20 being the core audience since younger kids may have some issues with some levels or not fully understand the game mechanics. This game has ended up has ended up fairly similar at its core to VVVVVV though the addition of an extra axis to flip gravity on will lead to new ideas and mechanics not possible in VVVVVV or other similar single-axis gravity flipping games. VVVVVV was received very well and is remembered as one of the classic indie games of the early 2010s and its simplistic nature means that up against it 1 on 1 it would be hard for Gravity Bender to come out on top due to time constraints and experience difference, though the multi-axis gravity changing will give it some space to breathe as its own thing.

In exchange for the ability to jump, you have the power to control the direction of gravity at will!

features: 

- 4 directional gravity changing

- a bunch of cool and interesting puzzles

- the loss of the famed "jump" button

Inspiration/ "concept art"

VVVVVV is generally where im basing off now that the core idea needs to be fleshed out into a full game, as VVVVVV has done similar mechanics so it works as a place to get inspiration from

(https://www.theverge.com/2014/6/10/5797576/retro-platformer-vvvvvv-is-coming-to-...)

(https://apptrigger.com/2017/11/13/vvvvvv-nintendo-switch-review-kids-age-still-b...)