Escaping Charges: The Long Arm of (Coulomb's) Law

Stage select screen: never try these at home.

Inspiration

All three of us came from the same high school, and we bonded over our past physics experiences. Despite our passion for the subject, we agreed that electricity and magnetism was the part we struggled the most in. Lamenting over the lack of visual aids to help students, inspiration hit us like a stream of electrons in a lightning bolt: why don't we make one ourselves?

Two of us had the same high school physics teacher, who really loved E&M. This game is dedicated to him. Dr. Wheeler, if you ever see this, I hope you enjoy this game.

What it does

In this game, you get to help this criminal escape to the portal using particles, capacitors, and magnetic fields! (Don't worry, this bad particle only broke physics laws).

You can pick your charge, as well as the crime you’re charged for! Depending on the severity of your crime, you the difficulty of the stages changes. Each unique stage could feature electric or magnetic fields, or maybe even a combination of both. While some stages have set elements in certain places, other stages allow you to introduce your own.

How I built it

Our team was composed of two programmers and an artist. All the art was done during those 24 hours on Krita, before being imported into the game. We built a simple physics engine from basic physics principles to make sure that our game at least approximated how the actual charges would work. The bulk of the project was coded in Javascript, with a few lines of HTML to fit everything together.

Challenges I ran into

Since we had a lack of experience in JavaScript, we had to learn things as we went. Javascript presented many challenges, but the worst was the very permissive object system, which allowed us to make simple mistakes and leave out function arguments without the compiler telling us. Also, by the end of the project, our overall structure was rather lacking, so, as we rushed to complete the project, we ended up spending more time than we needed to fixing strange bugs which cropped up.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

We’re proud that this now exists, for the benefit of many students everywhere. We can also (hopefully, eventually) say that our high school physics teacher liked this. Finally, we are proud of the many particle accelerators we created while testing the physics engine we created overnight.

What I learned

We got better at Javascript and learned more about collaborative programming workflows. We also learned that it is easy to overestimate how much time we have and hard to continue working at a quick, effective pace after multiple consecutive hours of intensive coding.

What's next for Escaping Charges: The Long Arm of (Coulomb's) Law

We will clean certain stages up and add backgrounds in order to make this more interesting. We want to give a special prize to those who complete all the stages. We plan on releasing a "Build a Stage" feature, where you fully customize your own stages in order to challenge your friends.