Remastering Gravity the Game

In highschool I didn't program until junior year, and the first "game" I made could barely be called that.

I was attending a hackathon at my school because it was hosted by a then-friend and I wanted to have fun fooling around with friends overnight. I had no ideas for any project, and the only thing I was considering was helping a different friend, T, with her project to make a nice view for Tumblr archives. After a couple of hours trying to help her with it, it was clear that I didn't know how to do anything and wasn't going to learn that night.

I tried to do my own thing to unburden her with my presense and started working on a game for the movie I probably watched most recently, Gravity. The game would be that you play as the asteroid in Gravity with clooney heads flying around the screen, and you click on them to knock him out. The boss would be bullock's head enlarged. I had no idea how to do anything but had been looking through fun Tumblr pages because of the last project, so I started yanking out random code and got something together that almost ran.

The game was barely anything at all and it still didn't even work. T and I approached our friend K who along with his father helped us get some stuff working ahead of the deadline. (Aside: K is still one of the funniest and coolest people, I wish I talked to them more and I'm always happy to see that they seem to be doing well).

With K's help, Gravity the Game was born

I can't emphasize enough how silly this was, so heres its implementation intead:

12 years later, with a few degrees under my belt and 7 years experience as a software developer, I now had what it took to take another shot as this really serious project. (Really, I wanted to learn Godot, and what better project could exist to remake to learn the fundamentals).

First I remade the original game in Godot, adding in health to the clooney and bullock heads so that you have to click them more than once.

Then I implemented the Storm mode where clooney heads spawn randomly across your screen and you need to click on as many as you can before the time limit ends.

Finally I added the Catch mode where you pilot the ISS left and right, catching clooney heads as they fall.

Some smaller details added were:

• A shader on the ISS that shows a yellow wave of pee, based on the actual percentage of pee in the ISS (fetching the pee value was taken from pISSStream
• Saving highscores for each game mode
• Reworking the game towards the end to practice composition

Outside of learning the literal Godot elements, the biggest learning curve was just trying to think with composition instead of inheritance. I'm deep into the actual game I wanted to make, WarpSpeed, now but I still don't have a great eye for composition. This will probably only come with experience.

The game is still simple, but it taught me a handful of basic for Godot, and put me in a good place to move onto the game I wanted to make. It was cute to just compare the 3 lines of meaningful code in the original, to the mass of implementation in the "remaster"

I hosted the game on itch.io for my friends, but it didn't feel right to publish a game with Clooney and Bullock, so it'll remain unlisted. Maybe one day if they reach out to me when im so famous, explicitly granting permission, it may be available to the public