Lester the Serf will have the special ability of being able to fire weapons. There will be a variety of weapons to discover around the different levels of the game, and I'm planning of having certain weapons do certain things. Quite what exactly, I don't yet know, that still has to be thought about, but it opens up loads more options for puzzles.

In the video above, Lester can be seen shooting a barrel that contains a cross. The cross is actually already in the room, it's just positioned off screen, beyond the boundaries of the room, so the player can never reach is.

When the fired projectile hits something, the rules module determines what the outcome should be. The rules can operate at varying levels of detail. For example, there is a general "hit any barrel" rule that will:

• Destroy the barrel entity
• Add a transient explosion entity where the barrel was
• Play the barrel explosion sound effect

Inside the "barrel hit" rule, there will be further checks to see if a specific barrel in a particular room has been hit, and if so, carry out whatever actions are required. In the example above, the action is to simply move the cross entity to where the barrel once was.

All of the rules are hard coded, there's no fancy scripting or data files to define conditions and outcomes. Performance takes priority when coding Playdate, it's CPU can quickly get busy. To keeps the rules manageable, they're separated out into their own code module, and within that module they're processed based on the event that occurred.