Particle effects! To be honest, at this point I was going over the top. Graviter was finally achieving some degree of fame on the forums, and I just couldn't resist showing off. The game was actually running quite slowly at this point, so it was somewhat of a stupid idea to put these in, but whatever! They looked cool!

As if I hadn't ripped off Portal enough, here's a screenshot with Portals! The truth is, I got this idea from Super Meat Boy, and just had to try it out to see what would happen

A cool little level where I show off a cool new idea I had for a while - grabbable ropes. Unfortunately, I took these out because they were way too unstable with the way I was handling player motion in Zedd. In addition to that, clipped lines no longer existed in Axe at this point, so things didn't look quite right.

A quick little demo I made to demonstrate the rope library packed with Zedd. You can see me failing at the beginning - I don't know why I left that in the screenshot I thought up this level over the summer, when I was self-studying Physics. I was reading about momentum conservation, and thought, man! I just have to get a puzzle of this into Graviter! And so I did.

A quick level I made to try and show off what you could do with ropes. There was no friction between objects that this point, so I think I replayed this level over 20 times to get it right, and even then I still messed up It was about at this time that i started pushing Builderboy to get Zedd2 ready, since that version had friction. Zedd2 ended up breaking a lot of things for me, however, so it was somewhat of a tradeoff at the time.

A weird little Newton's cradle simulation in Zedd that I didn't get to work in this screenshot. I made it to test out how ropes worked, but as you can see, things went weird! I later figured out that since I forgot to take out collision checks with the tilemap, it was colliding with phantom data in L2

The first screenshot showing my move over to Zedd. The engine I made myself was horrible! It had all sorts of nasty pixel tests, and drawing virtual rectangles, and I jumped when I saw this alternative. It was amazing because I basically plugged it right into what I had so far of the game and it just worked!

A weird intro concept I made that never quite panned out. It looks cool though, I'll give it that ^^

A quick little puzzle I made to demonstrate all the cool things you could do in the new version of Graviter (which is not much, given all the cool stuff you could do in the older versions!) You can see, however, that picking up the boxes attaches them to your trail. I still have not figured out how to make a decent "hold object" deal in Zedd; everything I try with velocities inadvertently makes things go flying. The problem with this is that it has some four collision checks every frame, so that was way too many for the calculator to handle and thus you can see it going pretty slowly. You can see how I was slowly moving away from the fast paced arcade levels in favor of slower levels that really made you think instead of run.

The very first screenshot of what was to become the "new" Graviter. This was the turning point from when Graviter was a great game to when Graviter transcended the usual platformer crap and became something unique. Just kidding! Graviter became just as crappy as it always was. I think I got the idea for the character from a cross between Wheatley and the main character in the iPhone game Contre Jour. What I was really going for was not the body part of the player's avatar, but the tail. The trail really ties up the package and makes the game feel a bit more interesting.

 
A little comparison here - the first screenshot is the optimized version by Runer112, and the second screenshot is my original. It's amazing what some detailed code cleanup can really do to improving the feel of your game! I really have to give Runer props here - even though I didn't end up using a lot of the code he optimized for me (I'm sorry Runer ) I still found (and find!) it amazing what he can pull off. I find it cool how similar menu designs have even popped up in some more recent projects, even if they may not have been influenced by Runer and me

This was the supposed "reboot" of Graviter. This screenshot is actually really funny, because it's the first version where I actually used signed numbers. In the past, I would have separate cases - for going up, I would subtract the magnitude of the velocity, and for going down I would add the velocity. You can tell that this was extremely unoptimized, so I rewrote almost the entire physics engine. You can see in this screenshot that it actually went so fast that it became nearly unplayable (the sensitivity was horrible - I think I recorded this over 10 times before I got even this crappy run). I remember making this when I was supposed to be studying for AP Chem. Whoops!

Some experimental stuff that lasted a couple of days before i forgot about it and went to work on other stuff. Now that I look back, these blocks had some interesting potential! I actually think I made them because Phenomist wanted to use them in his level design. It's weird because I would ask Phenomist to make levels, but the levels he made would always ask for elements that didn't exist yet, creating a vicious cycle that threatened to devour me whole.

If you look at the bottom left, you can see a little swirly thing - that was an "alternate" exit. At this point, the idea of a nonlinear path throughout the levels kinda appealed to me, just to spice the game up and really give it that replay value. Unfortunately, you can see how slow the game was getting at this point, so I decided to do some major revamping and optimizing before I would again focus on level elements. It was around this time when Builderboy and Runer112 became so helpful to me when I was learning to clean up my code.

A screenshot of the first level in the first demo I deemed worthy enough to upload to TiCalc. You can see that this level is fairly difficult, and that's really the kind of feel I was going for back then.

A really cool screenshot of the first few campaign levels. You can see that tossing the box actually flings them due to the way I was handling air friction - I calculated it based on the mass of the objects. Since the boxes were so light, a simple jump and toss could send them flying!

A simple level that was supposed to make it to the campaign. It was the first such screenshot to demonstrate jumping, and when combined with a really simple puzzle made for a nice simplistic level flow.

Another element stolen from Builderboy. I couldn't figure this one out until he told me to use pixel checks - I was using pointer locations before! It's somewhat of a joke that if you see a box or barrel in any game, it's an indication that the game developers ran out of ideas. Is that true here? Maybe, but maybe not. Crates are somewhat of a staple in physics puzzle games.

Experimenting with new puzzle ideas, and Portal 2 was out at this point (or maybe just the trailers, I don't quite remember) so I wanted to try making the lasers. It was my opinion that Valve had taken out the energy balls because they didn't provide "instant feedback" like the lasers did, so even though I could have gone with making energy balls, I didn't (also because I didn't really want to steal more from PortalX than I already had ) The problem with this was that although it seems to work well in this screenshot, it's way too slow in the actual game loop. It checks every single pixel along the way of the path, and checks two other pixels for every step. All this has to take place in a single frame! I'm sure it's possible in ASM or even really optimized Axe, but my past self didn't know anything. Jeez that kid was dumb!

I got the idea for this infamous blood splatter from IWBTG. Having beat it the summer before making this screenshot, it really had an impact on how I designed some graphical effects, and really made me think about what kind of difficulty would be good for players. I thought about how I was going to do this for quite a while actually, since I was still fairly new to programming at this point, but I created something that really started me thinking about more "wow!" kind of visual effects for this game. You might notice that a lot of calculator games out there are bland, and don't give enough visual feedback to capture the player. I hoped to change that with little attentions to detail like this one. (I have a tutorial on how to make this up in the Tutorials section!) You can also see here that I figured out arrays at this point, so I threw in some boxes there for fun

One of the biggest problems with this version was that the sensitivity was way to high due to the fact that I was using full pixel motion (with no inflation), so every movement would feel like walking on butter seal slicks. In this screenshot, DJ_O shows just how bad the controls were in the old days.

This was a pretty cool screenshot - I remember that in (Shmibs I think?)'s guide to making awesome calculator games, he mentioned that only in the most awesome of awesome games would you have to use the up and down keys to move. That's where I got the idea to make horizontal shifting, because of course I wanted this game to be the best of the best This level was made by my great friend Phenomist.

The oldest screenshot I have left of the scrolling version of Graviter. In many ways I liked the arcadey feel of this version, but at the same time I wanted a game that would make people think. You can see that this was the version in which I began blatantly ripping sprites off from Builderboy's PortalX

Oh, the nostalgia! In my opinion, this was the best version of Graviter.
I wrote this during winter break, and I remember that my brother and I were watching the new Facebook movie. Instead of watching you know what I was doing? Programming this game! That's right, ladies, screw movies! I'll just show you what I can do on a calculator! Yeah!