Despite all appearances to the contrary, reality is fairly lazy. Apply force, object moves in direction of force, and although there are a million little sub-rules that’s a good chunk of physics in a nutshell. People can choose to alter their walking trajectory to move in a circle but a thrown or otherwise propelled object is moving in a straight line unless another force acts on it. And then there’s Orbital Bullet, where the levels take place on a series of rings and the bullets are as tied to the track as everything else is. This heavily implies the player is an external viewer of a recursive space rendered in a way comprehensible to beings used to a mere three dimensions, but honestly there’s too much shooting going on to worry about the nature of the game’s reality.
Orbital Bullet has had a couple of demos during the the Steam Game Festivals and they’ve been a lot of good fun. The game is an action-platformer roguelike where a lone gunner blasts through one area after another, clearing enemies in small levels made of concentric rings. The enemies tend to stick to their own ring, but not always, while the gunner can skip to the inner and outer loop through jump pads. Clear all the enemies and hop up to a new ring, with each section of levels having a couple of linked circular towers to work through on the way to the boss. In classic action-roguelike fashion new weapons can be found or bought along the way, and unlocks back at home base can be purchased to make the next run go a little more successfully. The Orbital Bullet demo showed off a unique platfomer/shooter with a clever level structure that gave a good sense of each area in a way that standard scrolling wouldn’t, and now it’s got an Early Access release date of April 22. The ballistic physics may look a bit odd but when you’ve got a sliver of health left and a pile of enemies it’s good to know that the bullets are going to stay on the circular path.
