Vacuum and Force

2012

I spent a long period of time trying to develop any video game to completion, always failing. I have a folder of around 50 abandoned game projects, all at varying levels of incompletion. Finding defeat over and over again was frustrating, but I kept learning along the way. My senior year of high school I took a physics course where I had the option to create my own project. I decided I would create a short game that demonstrated one of the concepts from classical mechanics: acceleration. After a single weekend of nearly non-stop work where I had to use all the knowledge I had gained so far, I had finished my first game. This was an incredible breakthrough. The result, Vacuum and Force, was a simple 40 stage game where the player must guide a ship with thrusters through obstacle courses in space. For my first complete game, it was surprisingly a solid creation. It was the first of many titles I built using the Game Maker engine.