A relativistic Mario

Sometime at the end of 2018 I had the idea of putting together a game based on relativistic Physics. Imagine Super Mario going at nearly the speed of light, experiencing Lorentz contraction and time dilation! I was super excited imagining how such a game would look like. Since then, I have devoted a big part of my free time working on the game.

It felt more a research project than game development, though. While I have a background in Physics (degree, PhD, PostDoc), I had a lot to learn about the subject. For example, rigid bodies are ubiquitous in games, but are trickier in Special Relativity than Classical Mechanics. Another example: the classical interactions between bodies, like Coulomb's law or Newton's law of universal gravitation, are totally broken from a relativistic standpoint. They predict "action at a distance" and assume that  gravitational and electrical fields instantaneously change everywhere following the trajectories of the source particles.

In these years, I overcame enough of these difficulties and I now have a framework I can use to answer the questions I had in 2018. I can see Lorentz contraction and time dilation right on my screen. I can also see objects rotating when accelerated in different directions, an effect experienced by particles moving inside particle accelerators and known as Thomas precession.

My vision, however, is not yet realised. I want to put all this Physics in a proper commercially-viable game. I want to prove that human intuition can grasp Special Relativity, if it is given an opportunity to experience it. I believe that video games are the right medium to train intuition (I recommend Jonathan Blow's presentation on the subject, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qWFScmtiC44). After all, I gained a lot of my intuition for Physics by tinkering and having fun.

To realize my vision, I took the decision of quitting my job and working full time on this project. Becoming a dad and having a demanding job meant that I could work half a day per week on the game, at best. This was not enough time to make significant progress. So here I am, needing all the support I can get to make this vision a reality.

In the posts following this first one I will share more details of how I implemented relativistic Physics in my game engine. I will also share pictures and videos. In particular, I'd like to explore some of the paradoxes of Special Relativity by reproducing them inside my framework. Stay tuned!