Hundred Bullets, Re-inventing Shmups – Xbox Wire

Hundred Bullets has been in a lot of ways my life’s work. It was created in 2009. I started with the mathematical question, “If you shoot a bullet into a circular circle ring will it return at you eventually?” The prototype I created was a basic circular ring in which you could fire bullets at the wall and the bullets would return to you. When I looked at my real life, I felt that I was trapped in a ring, a bubble. Most of what I did was reflecting back on me. It was a challenging environment for an artist, and it was not conducive to the type of creativity I want to pursue.

But that’s the creative world, its an arena where most of our best ideas turn into something warped we have to fight against, right? The world of creativity should be simple, but I feel it must seem a bit complicated. Hundred Bullets. Every plan can be twisted, and there are always things that go wrong. My own prototype would allow me to game the levels, but it was many years later. This means that you as the player can select a bullet pattern to make it easier for you to win. You can, for example, move around in circles to outsmart walls rather than moving at random or getting caught up in your own tracks.

Once Hundred Bullets became about reclaiming the bullet pattern and becoming aware of how your own choices impact the future the theme of the game was clear and it became pretty easy to design the rest of the game’s levels. As I came up with various shapes and walls, you needed to pay attention to your defeats. You can’t beat cheater walls because they will be sniping at you regardless of where you are. To avoid these walls, the player must follow a certain pattern.

We realized the game was too abstract and decided to give it a Zen twist. Each level was given spiritual symbols based on what each level brought up. Many symbols have roots in Buddhism. Others are Celtic and some from African religions. The game was reframed as a journey to spiritual enlightenment. This is a much better way of framing it than the complicated abstract geometry no one understood. We even added kōans before some of the levels to make it more clear that it was a spiritual journey for the player.

A kōan is a story, dialogue, question, or statement which is used in Zen practice to provoke the “great doubt” and to practice or test a student’s progress in Zen. This really resonated as an invitation to understand and accept my self. That’s what Hundred Bullets It’s all about mastering your bullet patterns. Do you really know who you are? It seems kind of cheesy for a game that is a simple shump to mean so much to me but I’ve been working on it for a big chunk of my life and its quite important to my own sense of self and ideas about who I am and how my actions affect the world around me.

I hope you enjoy my game. The game was made to be simple and easy to learn, but difficult to master. If you are able to follow the clues, we have added some secret levels. Enjoy your time and good luck.