Gravity Heist - Experimental Project
Project Overview
Gravity Heist is an ongoing prototype that I am working on. My goal is to complete the project within the month of January (an MVP that is) and look to publish if it's compelling.
This prototype is driven by two core pillars:
🌌 First, gravity control as a primary gameplay verb. The player can actively define their own gravity direction, with multiple interaction styles depending on intent.
💵 Second, a fantasy heist experience that meaningfully blends stealth, movement mastery, and improvisation rather than just borrowing surface-level tropes.
What I’m showing today is an early pass on the gravity system, along with some light context on how it works.
Everything here is fully replicated and largely driven by Unreal’s Gameplay Ability System, along with tags, cues, and related systems. Since this project is multiplayer-focused, building it on top of GAS was important, and definitely came with a (re)learning curve this week.
From a player-facing perspective, gravity is broken into a few different “styles” or movement types. Right now there are three, with room to expand if needed:
🧱 Plane Gravity -
This is the simplest version. The player casts forward and gravity is set to the negated surface normal of the hit. Outside of slanted surfaces, this mostly covers the six cardinal directions and acts as the foundation for more controlled movement.
🌑 Directional Gravity -
This mode pulls the player toward a specific hit location, rather than a surface plane. It’s useful for precision traversal or reaching hard-to-access points. Gravity continues toward the original hit location even if the player overshoots it, but once they enter a small acceptance radius, gravity smoothly resolves back to the plane they initially hit to avoid awkward snapping.
🪢 Tethered Gravity -
This is the most experimental, but potentially the most interesting. Gravity continuously updates toward the hit point, even as the player moves past it. Functionally, it behaves like on-demand planetary gravity. To avoid the feeling of being pulled in like a magnet, gravity strength scales with distance, giving it more of a slingshot or orbital feel.
All of this is very much a work in progress, and I’m open to feedback across the board. Camera smoothing during gravity transitions is still being tuned, and you may notice a few moments where I reset gravity manually in the demo. I also move pretty quickly through the showcase, so apologies in advance for speedrunning the mechanics a bit.
Looking forward to sharing more as this continues to take shape, hopefully sometime next week..