Ragdoll Cannon 4: Load, Aim, Fire!

Popular flash games usually have juicy graphics and colourful effects. But sometimes the game conquers the players' attention without that, being just a pure gameplay. One of such games is the Ragdoll Cannon series by Russian flash game developer JohnnyK.

In 2008 JohnnyK published in his blog the story about his first steps in flash game development. He experienced the common problem of most of the beginner indies: as a programmer he was not a skilled artist. But he made use of this quality and drew all the game elements with a ball-point pen on a paper in an intentionally simplistic style. Then the scanned picture was used as a base for drawing in Flash IDE.

The game somehow reminds of the popular circus performance: launching an acrobat from the cannon. During the 50 levels of Ragdoll Cannon 4 your cannon launches ragdolls and you should hit the target with one of them. The target is a box with the text 'HERE' on it or a ball with letter 'H'.

You control the cannon with your mouse: the position of the cursor sets its angle and the further it is from the cannon, the more powerful shot will be. Different obstacles prevent you from achieving your aim: walls, waving and rotating planks, chains, bombs etc. All the complicated physical model is calculated with the free Box2D Engine.

Besides the ordinary ragdolls, two special types of ammo are available in the game: Exploding ragdoll and Sticky ragdoll. The first one helps you to remove destroyable obstacles. And the sticky one sticks to some movable level elements and changes their center of weight.

The success story of JohnnyK inspired a great number of programmers to enter indie business. And many of them started their career making the cannon game of their own. Thus, this genre became oversaturated. Even concerning the Ragdoll Cannon itself, some people say that the 4th game in the series is too much, but most players continue launching ragdolls, hitting the targets and having fun.




And this is Ragdoll Cannon 4 walkthrough:

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Categories: action, physics, puzzle, shoot