Turbo Pudding
When a Jammer gets you in Loudnik, we want you to think “I should have moved,” never “that wasn’t fair.” Most of that comes from small rules buried in the code. It’s Wednesday, so here are the ones we lean on most.
The picture at the top is from Speaker Canyon, where a ring from the Stack Colossus is rolling past Volta’s ship. One violet orb sits on the nose, a crimson bullet touches the right wing, and the ship is fine.
The ship is bigger than its hitbox
Volta’s ship is drawn as a speaker: an arrowhead with a speaker cone in the middle. It’s 26 units across, on a screen that’s always 360 units wide. But a bullet can only hurt it in one spot, the dust cap at the center of the cone. The real hitbox is a circle with a radius of 2.6 units, a fifth of the ship’s width. Whenever enemy bullets are on screen, the game marks it with a white dot in a dark ring.
Bullets get the same deal from the other side. Only the inner three quarters of a bullet counts, and every bullet is drawn a little bigger than its real size. A glowing rim brushing a wing is just a close call.
Close calls pay
A bullet that passes close to the hitbox, within 16 units plus its own size, is a graze. Each one is worth 20 points and a tiny cyan spark, and nudges up the VOLUME bar under the pick counter. A ship that’s still blinking after a hit can’t graze, so nobody collects points while untouchable.
No shots from point-blank
A bullet is never born within 40 units of the ship, so nothing pops up on top of you. An ordinary Jammer holds its fire while it’s within 64 units of you, while it’s still above the top edge of the screen and once it drops into the bottom fifth.
On Quiet, the easiest setting, aimed shots also miss on purpose by up to six degrees, so a small sidestep beats them.
A warning before every big hit
Big attacks always show where they’ll land. Presses, falling pipes and the heaviest guns first mark the spot with a shadow or a dashed band, and only turn deadly when the warning runs out. A press in the Factory of Silence gives you 0.8 seconds. In Bell Garden, the Wind Organ’s pipes give you 0.9, and you can watch each pipe drop toward its shadow.
Boss beams work the same way. Hushmost, Monotone’s flagship, charges its big gun for 1.2 seconds, and the band it’ll fire along shows the whole time. For the first 62 percent of the warning, the band follows you. Then it locks in place, so there’s always time to step aside. On Quiet, every beam warns 30 percent longer and locks halfway through.
Bosses can’t drag on forever. A phase that runs two and a half times longer than we meant moves on to the next one, and if it was the last, the boss breaks apart.
When your thumb lets go
On a phone, the ship never jumps to your finger. It moves as far as your finger travels, times 1.25 by default, so your thumb can rest anywhere and never covers it. A tap with a second finger, or on the round button in the corner, drops a record.
Lift your thumb, and nothing bad happens. After about a tenth of a second, everything eases down to a quarter of its speed, and the screen says “Touch to fly on.” A quick re-grip changes nothing. Leave it for three seconds, and the game pauses itself. On a keyboard, Shift slows the ship to 60 percent for fine dodging.
A last-second save
If a bullet does get through and you still have a record, it isn’t over yet. On Loud, you get eight frames, about an eighth of a second, to drop it, and the ship lives. Quiet gives you a fifth of a second, Louder a tenth and Full blast a fifteenth. On Quiet, a record also goes off on its own instead of the hit.
The Sleeve from the Garage takes a hit for you, wipes away the bullets close around the ship and costs one tape level. When a ship is lost, every bullet within 120 units vanishes, the next ship blinks safely for two and a half seconds, and your records are topped back up to the starting count. Thirty percent of your picks spill out and stay for about four seconds, so you can grab them back.
Picks come to you, capsules don’t
Fly up into the top 30 percent of the screen, and every pick on screen streams to the ship. Capsules are the exception. Each one shows the tapes in turn, and catching it can change yours, so the game never pulls one in for you. That’s your call.
The first three stations, Bell Garden and the Wind Organ included, are free to play in your browser at loudnik.com. The full game, all ten stations and every boss, is $4.99, paid once. More about the game is on the Loudnik page.
