Launched this week
Gravity Well Arena
Combat game where time dilation is the core mechanic
1 follower
Combat game where time dilation is the core mechanic
1 follower
Orbit a black hole, fighting AI ships. Dive deep and your weapons hit harder, but the universe speeds up around you. Enemies orbit faster, fire more, reposition before you react. Climb out and you're safe but weak. Real orbital physics, beams that bend with spacetime, 6 gravity-aware weapons, AI that exploits time dilation against you. Runs in the browser, no install.
CAPTCHA Royale
Hey everyone. I built Gravity Well Arena because I wanted to see what happens when you take a real physics concept (Schwarzschild time dilation) and make it the central mechanic of a game instead of just a visual effect.
The idea is simple: you're orbiting a black hole, fighting AI ships. The closer you get to the event horizon, the slower your proper time runs relative to the universe. From your perspective, your controls feel exactly the same, but the world around you speeds up. Enemies orbit faster, fire more frequently, and make decisions quicker. Your weapons also hit harder at depth (a mass driver fired from the furnace does double damage), so there's a constant push-pull: power vs. pressure.
What I think makes it interesting:
The AI actually plays the dilation game. Vultures camp at the rim where they have a time advantage. Commanders actively seek the opposite depth from you. Divers bomb you from low orbit then climb back out.
The photon lance (beam weapon) follows geodesics. It visibly bends near the black hole, letting you curve shots around obstacles.
Impulse rockets don't kill directly. They shove enemies toward the event horizon and let gravity finish the job.
Every sound is procedurally synthesized. No audio files. The ambient drone drops to sub-bass as you descend, and a heartbeat kicks in near the abyss.
Tech: built in Rust with wgpu, runs native (Metal/Vulkan/DX12) and in the browser via WebGPU/WASM. The leaderboard backend is a Cloudflare Worker with D1.
I wrote up a deeper dive on the design and physics behind the game here: https://sean-reid.github.io/blog/gravity.html
The whole thing is open source. Would love feedback on the difficulty curve and whether the dilation effects feel dramatic enough. Those have been the hardest things to tune.