Use your coding skills to manipulate and explore cyberspace
One of the benefits of being at the Game Developers Conference is being able to meet the talent behind such inventive and quirky games. While many of the heavy hitters get most of the attention, there’s plenty of other titles that will make you look twice. Many of which offer something a bit different and bizarre, such as Glitchspace.
Glitchspace is an action/adventure platformer focusing on emergent gameplay within a digital world. Currently released in paid Alpha form, players must trek through a series of devious and mind-bending puzzles that take advantage of the environment, while using your programming skills to traverse the ever changing landscape of cyberspace.
Yes, programming is a major part of the game, and it’s actually fairly simple to use. Now before you freak out, you’re not asked to type out lines of code on the spot, it’s much more interesting than that. In Glitchspace, your character in the digital world possesses a gun that allows them to manipulate special glitched platforms and other objects in the world. You can assign special programmed ‘objects’ to these glitches, which can manipulate the properties of the environment.
Something the developers at Space Bungie wanted to introduce to players was programming. Granted, Glitchspace is a very streamlined and fast-paced version of programming, this title does use mathematics and some forms of physics to amplify or degrade glitches. Albeit in a very accessible way. Karl Inglott, game director for Glitchspace, spoke briefly about wanting to include such a meta concept for an action platformer. “We want to encourage players to explore programming, if they’re coming up with something that’s really crazy then it might clue something in their mind that’s even more awesome.”
As of now, the team is finishing work on the game and plan to release the full version sometime in the future. But they’ve still got some ideas that they would love to see implemented. “We were looking at it quite early on,” said Inglott, “when we were first coming up with the idea we wanted something that would allow players to share videos of their playthroughs. When we release another new version later on, we would like to include a mod that would allow for players to share their experiences.”
Glitchspace is currently available in its Alpha form for $5.99 on the developer’s official website.
