Back when Bullion was in the design phase, it was decided that the signature move that united all the player characters would be the "Bull Rush": once charged up, a player character could drop to all fours and bolt across the arena like an enraged bull. Any chests in the way would be smashed, enemies and other players would be knocked flying and take damage... the down side was that once rushing, the character had to keep going in a straight line until either the power ran out, or they ran out of the arena or into a solid obstacle (rocks, trees etc). It was intended to be a showcase "finishing" move, requiring flashy start-up animations plus several others just to execute the move, and caused more bugs than we would care to remember (yes, this includes the infamous "Teleporting Dead Bull" bug)! But we eventually got the mechanics working for Silverside by the Play Expo Manchester show in 2017...
... and then it kind of got forgotten about! We decided that we would work with a "minimum requirements" set in order to get additional playable characters plugged in; Bull Rush was not a necessity for a new character to be playable and had a high animation overhead, so it simply got switched off for all the characters that followed. And because of that, while Silverside's rush option was left switched on, we never put any time into balancing the mechanic or publicised it at shows. It became something "we would sort out later".
Well - it's "later"...
 Chaaaaaaaaarge!!! |
The message from our players is that they don't want a big flashy move that takes time to fire off once triggered - they just want to be able to get from A to B faster (or at least part-way), or get themselves out of trouble if things are going bad. So we took Bull Rush back to the drawing board and simplified it, while retaining as much of its "charging bull" signature as possible - at the end of the day, the "cow" part of Bullion was always intended to be something more than just an excuse for bad puns!
Gone are the big, drawn out flashy entry sequences and the complex all-fours animations. Instead, we now have a leaner, meaner Bull Rush: the player hits the button, the character immediately bolts forward. Gone too are the fiddly conditional charge-up and the "all-or-nothing" lack of control: the power charges up over time and once full, the rush lasts until the power runs out, the character leaves the arena or hits something solid OR until the player takes their finger off the button (okay, so we've introduced a minimum requirement that at least quarter of the power is used, but that's it). The character is still invincible while rushing (good for escaping!) and still has to go in a straight line, but our new Bull Rush introduces both immediate response and a degree of control to the player while also vastly reducing the development overheads.
In these mad times of viruses and lockdowns, we have no idea when our next show is likely to be. But rest assured, we fully intend to have all our bovine buccaneers able to use their Bull Rush to dash and/or escape by the next time we dock for a public demo!
 Back-mounted cannon equals jet-pack! |
