mGforce

mGforce is a 2D speedrun game made in GameMaker Studio 2 during the game development summer programme at NYU Tisch in 2025. The player controls a small circular UFO that fires two cables into the walls and swings from them to reach a portal. Each mouse button controls one cable, and WASD burns fuel to nudge the character. Three levels, a visible timer, and a per-level best time.

The brief was a pair project built from an assigned verb, and ours was “hang”. Hanging suggested ropes, ceilings and swinging, and the first reference was Cut the Rope. Two cables on separate mouse buttons gave the movement its character: one cable makes a pendulum, two cables make a slingshot.

Playtesting showed that the movement was fun but that a straight run to the portal lasted about two minutes. We turned the finish into a repeatable attempt: a visible timer, per-level best times, and a wall-bump penalty that adds time in proportion to impact speed. The penalty is the core of the design, because the fastest route is no longer the most aggressive one, and speedrunning becomes a precision problem rather than a force problem.

Two cables used together accelerate hard enough to throw the player into walls, which made the second cable feel like a mistake rather than an option. Instead of removing it I added stationary yarn “enemies” that block the shortest line: they do nothing on their own, but they add time on contact and can only be cleared by hooking them and pulling them aside, which forces the player to use both cables under pressure.

Arthur K. designed and programmed the two-cable grappling-hook movement. I worked on the game ideas, built the three levels, implemented the timer and best-score systems in the menus, and ran the playtests.

The game was shown at the final showcase with seven other projects and was scored 25/25 by the instructor, Diego Garcia, who then spent his own time trying to beat the records posted in the level select — which is the reaction the timer was built for: the game asks for momentum, timing and precision, and the scoreboard is how it asks.