Owl's Nest

VoidFlux press kit

Fact sheet

The pitch

A research physicist built a puzzle game on Gauss’s law. No equation appears anywhere in it. Players cancel flux by placing charge, which means they are doing real electrostatics by thumb.

About the game

VoidFlux is an electrostatics puzzle dressed up as a neon crystal toy from the 80s. Closed loops lie across a hex crystal board, each showing its flux, and a tray below holds charged gems. Place them so that the charge enclosed by every loop cancels its flux exactly. Use the whole tray, drive every flux to zero, and the board is solved.

The campaign’s 204 levels climb a difficulty curve that isn’t guessed: every board’s complete solution set is computed, and the levels are ordered by how scarce solutions get. Between rounds the game retells Wittgenstein’s Tractatus in 80s arcade slang, one scene per round, in nine languages, Latin among them. It ends where the Tractatus does: whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.

Synthwave soundtrack with eight tracks in rotation, three color-blind palettes, a Game Center leaderboard, 25 achievements with their own neon artwork, and iCloud sync between iPhone and iPad.

About the developer

Damian Sowinski is a research physicist, programmer, and game designer. Owl’s Nest Creations is his one-person studio: VoidFlux’s code, levels, story, and translations are all his. The games start from real physics and turn it into something you can play.

Screenshots

Right-click any image to save it; higher-resolution App Store captures available on request.

An early VoidFlux board: two hexagonal loops, one pink and one teal, overlapping across a black crystal, with two charged gems in the tray below.
Radius three, the smallest board in the game.
A VoidFlux board with a large teal loop around the boundary, a pink loop zigzagging across the middle, and five charged gems in the tray.
A radius-four board, mid-campaign.
A seven-loop VoidFlux board partway through a solve, one loop collapsed to a flat white outline.
The widest board in the game, four gems in.
Concentric hexagonal loops, two pink enclosing two teal, above a black crystal.
Loops nest as freely as Gaussian surfaces do.

Review copies

Promo codes are available for press and creators. Write to hello@owlsnestcreations.com and codes go out the same day.