Hundred Bullets has been in lots of methods my life’s work. I created it again in 2009 with the maths query of if you happen to shot out a bullet in a round ring would it not come again at you ultimately. I made a prototype of a easy round ring the place you might shoot bullets out and they’d bounce appropriately off the partitions and noticed that, sure, the bullets did finally come again at you in that setting. In my precise actual life I felt I used to be kind of caught in a hoop too, a bubble if you’ll, many of the stuff I used to be doing was being mirrored again at me as I used to be working in direction of discovering myself as an artist in an setting that was very aggressive and never very fertile to the form of creativity I’ve realized I love to do.
However that’s the inventive world, its an enviornment the place most of our greatest concepts flip into one thing warped now we have to battle in opposition to, proper? I want the world of creativity have been easy and easy nevertheless it appears it must be considerably circuitous, very like the degrees of Hundred Bullets. There may be at all times a twist, there may be at all times one thing to mess up the right plan. It could be a few years later that I noticed that in my very own prototype you might sport the degrees. That’s, because you, the participant, management the bullet sample, you possibly can intentionally select a sample that makes the sport simpler to win. For instance, in a round ring, you possibly can transfer in circles and outsmart the partitions as an alternative of transferring round at random and getting caught in your personal wake.
As soon as Hundred Bullets grew to become about reclaiming the bullet sample and changing into conscious of how your personal decisions impression the long run the theme of the sport was clear and it grew to become fairly straightforward to design the remainder of the sport’s ranges. I used to be developing with totally different sorts of partitions and totally different shapes and so forth that you just needed to be conscious of your actions to defeat. For instance, with the cheater partitions, they may snipe at you irrespective of the place you go, so the one option to beat them is to keep away from hitting them. This implies the participant has to maneuver in a particular sample to keep away from the problematic partitions.
Ultimately we realized that the sport was a bit too summary, and so we determined so as to add a little bit of Zen flavoring to the sport. We added religious symbols to every degree primarily based on the shapes and emotions every degree evoked. Among the symbols come from Buddhism a few of them are from African religions, others are Celtic, and so forth. We re-framed the sport as a quest for religious enlightenment which was far more clear than simply the summary geometry that nobody appeared to know. We even added kōans earlier than among the ranges to make it extra clear that it was a religious journey for the participant.
A kōan is a narrative, dialogue, query, or assertion which is utilized in Zen follow to impress the “nice doubt” and to follow or take a look at a scholar’s progress in Zen. And that actually resonated with me as a quest for understanding and accepting the self. That’s what Hundred Bullets is all about: are you able to grasp you personal bullet sample? Can you understand your self? It appears form of tacky for a sport that may be a easy shump to imply a lot to me however I’ve been engaged on it for an enormous chunk of my life and its fairly vital to my very own sense of self and concepts about who I’m and the way my actions have an effect on the world round me.
I hope you get pleasure from my sport. We tried to make it in order that it may very well be straightforward and easy to know however fairly troublesome to grasp. We even added a couple of secret ranges for the extremely grasp gamers on the market if you happen to can comply with the clues they’re there to be found. Good luck, have enjoyable!
