Student Project Spotlight

Photo: Super Shift logo and concept art

Here at The Open School we have some very remarkable students with unique and ambitious projects. One student that comes to mind is Mellythe1. She is known for taking on some deeply impressive projects anywhere from creating an album to starting an entire game development company. Mellythe1 puts a lot of her time into the craft of creating video games. Her recent development of the game Super Shift was her first use of game development software, Godot. 

Previously Mellythe1 had made all of her games in Scratch, a free browser based coding and game design software created by MIT. Most people that know Scratch know it as a very simple way of coding and designing 2D games. Which is generally how most people use Scratch. What most people don’t realize is Scratch has the potential to be a very powerful game design tool. Mellythe1 was even able to design a first person 3D ray tracing game engine similar to the old computer game DOOM. As well as literally hundreds of other impressive games. 

Super Shift is a 3D first person puzzle game that uses concepts from quantum physics to create its complex puzzles. The game has some similarities to the Valve game Portal, but has distinctly different conceptual origins. The game is based on the famous thought experiment Schrödinger’s Cat. It’s a thought experiment that imagines a cat in a sealed box with an explosive that has a 50% chance of killing the cat in the next hour. At the end of the hour what is the state of the cat? According to quantum mechanics at the moment before opening the box, the cat is both alive and dead at the same time. When the box is opened we know definitively the state of the cat, but before opening the box the cat exists in both states. The idea of something existing in multiple states at once is called quantum superposition. This concept is at the heart of quantum mechanics and served as the inspiration for developing some interesting game mechanics for Super Shift. 

Mellythe1 uses the idea of quantum superposition to create objects in the game that exist in multiple states. For example if you threw a cube at a superpositioned wall it both bounced and didn’t bounce off the wall, and now the cube itself is superpositioned and exists in these different states. If it sounds very complicated then you can understand why it’s a great concept for a tricky puzzle game.

While Mellythe1 impressively made most of the game and musical score on her own, she did have some help from some peers at The Open School with Super Shift. One student helped with the 3D modeling and some other students helped with playtesting. The goal is for the game to go through another year of development and then eventually be released to the public on Steam. So If you are a fan of mind bending puzzle games, keep your eyes peeled for Super Shift.