Gravitrix
Gravitrix
“Extreme Sports, Reimagined Digitally”
Project Title: Gravitrix
Team Members: Feng-Yi Lin, Rushil Sojitra, Taiyu Zhu, Tianyi Lin, Jesse Sae Xu, Bella Liu
Faculty Advisor: Jonathan Walton, Ricardo Washington
The Idea
XPogo, the world’s leading organization for extreme pogo athletics, wanted to inspire new audiences to discover the unique thrill of freestyle pogo — a sport combining acrobatics, momentum, and gravity-defying stunts. But how do you translate a high-intensity physical experience into a virtual one?
That was the question Team Gravitrix faced. The ETC students were tasked with creating a PC game that captured the energy and expressiveness of pogo sports — all while remaining approachable and fun for players with no real-world pogo experience.
Taking inspiration from both arcade-style platformers and extreme sports culture, the team aimed to create a game that wasn’t just about bouncing around, instead showing off the style, momentum, and playful mastery of physics involved in extreme sports. Their goal: introduce people to the creative, adrenaline-fueled world of pogo in the safety of their own home.
Team Gravitrix built a non-traditional sports game that reflects the weird, unique culture of extreme pogo. They brought a playful, infectious energy and art style to the work, and maintained a strong collaborative relationship with our partners at Xpogo.
Jonathan Walton
ETC Professor and Gravitrix faculty advisor
The Process
The semester began with research: watching hours of pogo tricks, talking to XPogo performers, and extensive prototyping in Unreal Engine. The team’s first goal was to develop a movement system that felt tight, reactive, and satisfying — a physics-driven control system that rewarded timing and creativity.
They also paid careful attention to the game’s level design, planning how each level taught the player something new about the control system and further immersed them in the game’s cyberpunk-inspired world. The team leaned into verticality, designing city-inspired environments that encouraged exploration and, most importantly, getting air.
Each week, they added new layers to it: boost jumps, double jumps, hidden coins and collectibles, and a trick-based scoring system. As player abilities grew, so did the level of complexity.
Throughout development, the team hosted weekly playtests to fine-tune difficulty and responsiveness. One key discovery: players loved improvising. In response, the team shifted away from strict level goals toward open-ended “Style Run” and “Free Bounce” modes, where players could discover new tricks and routes.
Late in the semester, the team also added a replay and scoring system that allowed players to share clips and compete asynchronously — expanding the game’s reach and replayability.
Gravitrix not only introduced me to the sport of extreme pogo sticking, but also to a team dedicated to single vision, working with all their heart — an ideal team. … One of the several important takeaways for me was to learn how to analyze, research and figure out what the fantasy of pogoing was, and how to translate that into a game. … Even after graduating, I still find something new to learn from the development process. It has truly been a wonderful project.
Rushil Sojitra
ETC '25, Gravitrix team member
The Impact
Gravitrix delivered a stylish, joyful experience that combined the spectacle of extreme sports with the satisfying mastery of physics-based platformers. Its tight controls, dynamic camera, and expressive motion system earned praise during ETC playthroughs and final presentations.
The project also sparked real-world momentum. XPogo expressed strong interest in further collaboration, and discussions began about using the game as an educational and promotional tool for youth outreach programs.
Most importantly, the game succeeded in its original goal: introducing players to a sport they may never have seen before — and making them want to bounce. Now, the team is working on rolling the game out onto the market — including demoing the game at 2025’s Pogopalooza to an audience of pogo enthusiasts.
Having a video game based around pogo has been a dream in the extreme pogo community forever, but always seemed like a far-off reality. The Gravitrix team did a great job helping capture the sport, and I was especially impressed by their thoroughness researching the tricks and physics of the sport; they consulted with us to figure out how to replicate the feeling of jumping, and they did just that! We’ve been very excited by their progress, the game’s potential, and the opportunity to help them share it with the world.
Will Weiner
CEO of Xpogo and Gravitrix client