Conceptual Origins

Gravity Break is the name of my Falcon DeLacy Python, kitted for mass transportation in Elite Dangerous, christened around 3302 (2016). The origins of my game is fractured and older. It's the game I always wanted, but I am still not sure what that is exactly.

In 2010, I started game jamming and joined the Danish Digital Institute for Interactive Entertainment (DADIU). During an initial workshop, we were brainstorming on how to incorporate gravitational mechanics in a board game. The idea sprawled into mechanics of time dilation, generation ships crossing the void between the stars (look up The Long Journey Homefor an excellent take) and epic visions of complex starship management (Star Traders: Frontiers is a prime example of how to do this right) but it didn't take off - and board games didn't feel like a good fit for me. Programming was still a weird sorcery at the time, and as the assigned game designer on the DADIU projects with very little prior experience, I got my hands full trying to find the fun original mechanics in the concepts we were working on.

Graduating in 2012, I started to feel more comfortable programming, and eventually, in 2013, the game crept back. In a month I transformed the grand vision of gravity and galaxy-spanning exploration to a simple Asteroids-clone prototype, made entirely on my own, released on Android in November 2013. I was proud, but the game was not what I wanted - just a first step. The core idea then was to bring "realistic" newtonian physics into the realm of a classic arcade game, and I wanted to use mass-thrust relations when picking up ore, heat management for laser control and high speed frictionless navigation to a simple touch device. Suddenly, the game exploded and the simply concept got out of hand, the fun vision of what could be steadily slipping away. For the following years, a few sporadic attempts at making something of it, dispersed into nothing. But I kept learning how to program, figured out that gravity is really not that hard, and started working at the Institute of Physics and Astronomy in 2014. Here, I got to work with physicist building a quantum computer, attempting to translate eigen states to sensible game feedback for citizen science-projects and coming to grips with a simulation of superpositions of rubidium 87.

I loved it, but trying to follow along was super intense, and eventually I had a breakdown.

2017 was spent trying to make a game capturing the feeling of jumping on a pogo stick. I still want to make that game, but maybe it was more of a therapeutic project.

Eventually the core of what Gravity Break is today, started crystallising in the summer of 2018. Going into a coding frenzy one night, simply putting a single controllable ship into the gravity simulation I made at LD30. After a single day of coding, I had an epiphany playing my game - I was actually having fun just flying around in a simple prototype.

The elation I felt when finding something so interesting in my own code is indescribable, but that is what has kept me coming back ever since. I have played with some interesting ideas, like interplanetary speed limits, bending the law of gravity, stealth missions based on albedo or angles of nearby reflectors, and multiple zoom-levels; but I feel like I have found a good offset to keep chipping away at this rough block of interactive space.