Slow Rush Studios logo,
    depicting an apprehensive-looking snail rushing forward

Slow Rush Studios

◂  Ladders and Shrooms
News index
Flinging Powder Atoms  ▸

Barrels of Boom

Contents

Finally, we have explosive barrels! And explosive fireworks!

Wait, explosive... fireworks? Yep, and I'll tell you why.

Explosive Barrels

A couple weeks ago I added support for explosions, but there was no way to actually create them via gameplay. 1

Gamers have been conditioned that red barrels are inexplicably explosive, so I sketched some options:

Different variants of barrel art
Different barrel artwork. It's surprisingly hard to stop the 'labels' looking like country flags.

And put them in the game:

Explosive barrels in action. The explosions have a small random delay, which makes them feel more impactful.

Broforce also tipped me off to another approach: make some barrels have a longer delay before exploding.

These grey barrels take a full second to explode.

The different barrels add some visual variety, and a little bit of tension if you notice one burning.

In future, I'll make barrels take damage (and explode) from falling too. 2

Explosive Fireworks

To really ramp up the chaos factor, I wanted to have a prop that can break through the isolation between two vertical platforms.

Enter, the firework rocket: 3

I shoot a fireball at a firework rocket

Heavily inspired by Broforce's propane-tank-rocket,4 this rocket inexplicably (but entertainingly) bores through otherwise-impassable terrain.

My hope is that this will cause more atom interactions (imagine acid raining through a gap, or water extinguishing a fire from above), as well as allow players to travel through the tunnels it creates.

Ideally players would also be able to ride the rocket,5 but I haven't implemented that yet. 6

Fewer Fiery Deaths

The explosions from fireworks and burning barrels tend to fling fire in all directions, which is nice from a maximizing-the-chaos angle.

But players were catching on fire from contact with just a single fire atom, so I increased that threshold to make players a little less flammable.

Gravity Boost

Up to now we've been operating with realistic gravity - your bog standard high-school-physics 9.81 m/s² downwards acceleration. 7

But under those conditions the barrels and fireworks seemed too floaty, so I doubled the gravity and updated jumping & jump pads to suit.

I reckon the whole game feels "tighter" now, which just goes to show that realism ain't always what it's cracked up to be.

Playable web build‎

I've added a bunch of barrels and fireworks to the first level, and moved the spawn point into the middle to make it easier to play with the new explosive toys.

(The window-size is a bit small, so you might also want to press - to zoom out so you can see more of the chaos.)

Click to focus, then play with keyboard and mouse. Mobile devices may or may not work! Give feedback.

The performance can drop a bit when all the explosions go off at once! It's made worse by the explosions needing to run for several game-ticks each to work around weaknesses in the atom movement logic, so I'm still seeing if I can improve that.


1

You had to press B while in Edit mode to create an explosion, sized to the cursor.

... And, well, actually there was also a brief window where pressing some modifier keys with B would create a half-baked explosive barrel, but I imagine nobody found that.

2

There's no falling damage for anything in the game yet, but at some point I'll do a pass to add it for barrels, rockets (below), enemies, and maybe players.

3

Why a firework? It's vaguely medieval, I guess, and I could make neat atom-based explosion patterns. I'm open to alternatives! (The rocket's art is definitely a bit loud in the context of a real level.)

4

Broforce's propane-tank-rocket is a little different, in that it can't be affected by physics forces once it's traveling. I like the additional chaos factor of letting the firework rocket be affected by explosions etc.. but maybe it'll make level design into pure hell. We'll see!

5

Like in Broforce.

6

I still have to work out a clean way to allow riding rockets while also allowing being squished by them.

Actually the whole "damage/death from physics forces" thing needs more tuning! Having a barrel fall on you doesn't hurt you, but sometimes touching a barely-tipping rocket while you're on a ladder causes you to explode.

7

Okay sure, players and enemies had higher gravity in the name of making jumping feel better.

◂  Ladders and Shrooms
News index
Flinging Powder Atoms  ▸