Composable Bullet Behaviors

Sun, 19 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This fall I started building a new game: a bullet-hell roguelike called DET-33, built on Phaser 3 and Vue. It’s the kind of game where the whole appeal is hundreds of projectiles on screen doing wildly different things, which means the weapon code becomes the heart of the project very quickly. Mine started as one weapon.js file, and it did not stay manageable for long.

The problem is the obvious one. A bullet that travels in a straight line, a bullet that spirals, a bullet that boomerangs back, a bullet that splits on impact, and a bullet that drops an acid pool are all “a bullet,” but the branching to support them in one file gets ugly fast. So I tore weapon.js apart and rebuilt the projectiles as composable behaviors using the strategy pattern.

Bullet-Hell on Nathaniel Inman

Composable Bullet Behaviors