This semester I worked on “Orientless,” a video game about movement in space, one of the only settings were up and down can be fully relative, or without orientation, hence the name.

I focused on the coding and game design aspect of my game, meaning I didn’t spend a lot of time on the graphics (visuals), the sound, or the story. However, there is something that makes my game special, even without those elements. Because games about movement (more commonly called platformers) are designed around gravity, and my game, being set in space, doesn’t have gravity, I had to reimagine how this genre of game would work, which lead to some very interesting gameplay.

The best example of this is how jumping works. In a regular platformer gravity pulls you down creating an arc, but without gravity you simply continue going in the same direction. Without using game design terms, straight lines are a lot more boring than arcs. Therefore, I experimented with a few Ideas, and found that grapple hooking allowed me to bring back arcs into my game, while at the same time functioning differently in the absence of gravity.