Gravitator4K

Gravitator4K (2836 bytes)

This game came in 39th place out of 55 with a score of 79.0000.

The game is fairly simple in concept, and is controlled via mouse. There's a particle fountain randomly placed on the screen, with a blinking target randomly placed elsewhere. You click on the screen to create gravitational masses (left click for attractors, right-click for repulsors). You have a limited number of masses you can place, and you cannot place them inside the target area. On the first level You need to get 100 particles to the target in the specified time limit. As you clear each level, higher levels have multiple fountains and multiple targets. You are allowed to place more masses, and the required number of particles for each target goes down. However, you must match the particles to the correct target by color!

After you've cleared 5 levels, the target size starts to decrease for additional difficulty.

Strategy Hints

Setting up multiple successful streams at once is cool, but sometimes it is easier to concentrate on one at a time... as long as it doesn't take you too long to set it up.
When placing masses (or anti-masses) far away from the emitter/fountain, gravitational effects will add up significantly by the time the particles travel far enough. Also, since all particles are affected when you place a new mass, even far away ones, expect your particle stream to change sometimes ten or fifteen seconds AFTER placing the mass (enough time for further away particles that were perhaps just emitted when you were placing the mass to travel across the field).
Anti-masses (repulsors) are good for completely reversing particle flow when the emitter is facing entirely the wrong way... otherwise they can be used to "nudge" a stream, but should probably be placed further away from the stream than you think.
When you place a new mass somewhere down the "chain", it affects everything on the field, even particles very far away. What happens next is that you see your mass immediately affect nearby particles in some fairly obvious way... usually the way you intended. However, over time, as the distant particles finally arrive near the mass, they will behave slightly differently than the nearby particles did and will take on new trajectories. This behavior is pretty non-intuitive and can occassionally look like the particles are affecting one another. Also, there is a granularity to the simulation - this means that even if you settle down to a steady-state situation and never add new masses you'll still see occassional variations in particle trajectories from one another as they pass the onscreen masses, even though they are starting at the same point at the same velocity being affected by the same masses.