Cannon Fodder (v03) is the third iteration on a prototype for a game inspired by the barrel cannons in Donkey Kong Country. I recently downloaded DKC for my Wii and was reminded of how much fun the levels that use the cannons are. The point of this prototype was to get the rotation and movement of cannons working and to see how much fun it is to just shoot the comet around. The only controls are the space bar, which fires a cannon once it’s loaded (sometimes the comet sticks, just keep pressing!). My idea is to keep that as the only player input and simply work in a lot of variety in the level design: moving cannons, rotating cannons, auto-fire cannons, maybe surfaces with different amounts of bounce.

Heather thought that it was kind of boring because sometimes you have to wait a long time for the comet to intersect with a cannon. But I find it pretty interesting to just watch the comet bounce around the stage. It is sometimes a bit like listening to one of Steve Reich’s phase pieces: the comet will get into a bouncing loop that encloses the moving cannon but the period of the loop is not the same as the period of the moving cannon and the shape of the loop is slowing changing. It’s possible to watch an interaction like that occur and then start guessing how many more loops it will take before the comet intersects the cannon.