Hundred bullets was my life’s work in many ways. I created it in 2009 with the mathematical question of whether if you fired a bullet into a circular ring, would it eventually bounce back on you. I made a prototype of a simple circular ring that you could shoot bullets out of and they would ricochet off the walls correctly and I saw that the bullets eventually came back at you in that environment. In my real life I also felt kind of trapped in a ring, a bubble if you will, most of what I did was thrown back at me as I worked to find myself as an artist in an environment which it was was very competitive and not very fruitful for the kind of creativity I’ve found I enjoy doing.
But this is the creative world, an arena where most of our best ideas turn into something twisted that we have to fight, right? I wish the world of creativity was simple and straight forward, but it seems like it needs to be a little awkward, much like the levels of Hundred bullets. There’s always a twist, there’s always something that messes up the perfect plan. Many years later I realized that you could play the levels in my own prototype. This means that since you, the player, control the ball pattern, you can consciously choose a pattern that will make winning the game easier. For example, in a circular ring, you can move in circles and trick the walls instead of moving randomly and getting caught in your own wake.
Once Hundred bullets It was about reclaiming the sphere pattern and becoming aware of how your own choices affect the future. The theme of the game was clear and it became fairly easy to design the rest of the game’s levels. I came up with different types of walls and different shapes and so on that you had to pay attention to your actions to defeat them. For example with the cheater walls, they will attack you no matter where you go, so the only way to beat them is to avoid hitting them. This means that the player has to move in a certain pattern to avoid the problematic walls.
Eventually we realized that the game was a bit too abstract and decided to add a little Zen flavor to the game. We added spiritual symbols to each level based on the shapes and feelings each level evokes. Some of the symbols are from Buddhism, some are from African religions, some are Celtic and so on. We redesigned the game as a quest for spiritual enlightenment that was much clearer than just the abstract geometry that no one seemed to understand. We even added koans a few levels back to make it clearer that this is a spiritual journey for the player.
A koan is a story, dialogue, question, or statement used in Zen practice to provoke the “great doubt” and to exercise or test a student’s progress in Zen. And that really spoke to me as a quest for understanding and accepting the self. That’s what Hundred bullets is all about: Can you master your own bullet journal? can you know yourself It seems kind of cheesy for a game that means so much to me, but I’ve been working on it for a large part of my life and it’s pretty important to my own sense of self and my idea of who I am and how my actions affect the world around me affect me around.
I hope you enjoy my game. We tried to make it easy and simple to understand but quite difficult to master. We’ve even added a few secret levels for the ultra master players out there if you can follow the clues to uncover. Good luck and have fun!
