So, so far I’ve managed not to put a thing about my pet project, Gravity Ed, on here, which seems absolutely DAFT.

Gravity Ed started life about 18 months ago when I scribbled a 1-screen puzzle on a piece of paper:

And it fast grew into a little old platformer (Here’s a playable version of the first prototype.)

I created most of the visuals myself- not bad considering I’m no artist! It took a couple of months to get to where you see it below (press E in the demo above to get the editor.)

The idea was that you’d need to use the gravity wells (You can see them when playing) to open up paths to the finish. Sometimes you could see a gravity well but you couldn’t reach it- What to do? Find an item, pick it up,  jump at the gravity well and throw it. It’ll then get carried away following the gravity well and land on a trigger, opening the door.

It was all very, very fun, but it lacked something. It looked too old, and competition is fierce, so after 8 months I decided to attempt it in Unity, where I had more mature 3D and I had better control over visuals.

Here’s a split screen; Old vs the first Unity Version:

I’ve been working with Georgina O’Neill of TheUpsideDownTree.com and Matt Hale of Hark Pictures. Between them they have bought Ed and the surrounding scenery to life. I wanted the game to feel retro, but with sharper graphics. Avoiding the loss of the retro feel and allowing sharper graphics is quite difficult, it turns out, but when you play it you FEEL the retro, but SEE modern.

The way this game is being built is unique. The images are drawn onto large pieces of paper and then scanned into Photoshop where they are polished prior to sending to me to implement. They look fantastic, and the level of detail means in the future a HD version is easy.

Ed himself is animated in Spine- meaning his legs, feet, arms were each individually drawn and scanned, leaving me to animate the guy!

It has all the gravity fun, a 3D element (visually), bad guys, puzzles… and lots of twisty fun.

Sadly this process takes time, 9 months later we are at the image below and only the first level is nearing completion.

Ladies and gentlemen, I introduce the current iteration of Gravity Ed:

(No playable version just yet- but we’re so close now!)