FANTASY ARTILLERY / PROTOTYPE
KABOOOM!
Loading the original artwork locally.
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Previous shot: none
A / D or Left / Right arrows move and turn · W / S or Up / Down arrows aim · 1 / 2 / 3 choose Normal, Secondary or Special · Tab / Shift+Tab cycle skills only, never items · hold Space to charge, release to fire. You can adjust aim and cycle skills during a held charge without losing power. Hold Shift for fine aiming. Press Escape to pause or open the online menu, then Tab to navigate controls. Chat, menus and non-game widgets keep normal focus navigation. The on-screen controls support mouse and touch.
Charging from empty to full takes about 4.2 seconds (24 percentage points per second). Power stops at 100% until you release. Each turn has 30 seconds and movement stamina refills each turn. Every champion has three distinct shots; hover over a shot card for its effect and delay. Friendly fire is ON: shots, beams and splash can hurt teammates and the shooter. Falling off an island is a knockout that ignores shields.
Native shields absorb damage from either side and recover at the start of their owner's turn. Shield bars and brief recovery labels show their current protection; shield recovery does not heal HP.
2v2 teams: optional match format; 1v1 remains the default. Team A is P1 + P3, Team B is P2 + P4. Local supports four humans on the same PC. Practice CPU is you (P1) and a random CPU ally (P3) against two random CPUs. Each champion keeps its own aim, power markers, stamina and turn delay. Defeated champions skip turns; their teammates fight on. A team wins only when all opposing champions are defeated; simultaneous elimination is a draw. Online defeated seats can still watch and chat.
Skills cost action delay, not mana. The portrait queue previews the next actions after your selected shot. Lower +delay acts sooner. Delay is a turn-order score, not seconds; skipping costs 300. While charging, aim and skill selection stay available, but movement, facing and item selection are locked. With Dual or Dual+ armed, Tab cycles only Normal and Secondary; Specials cannot be doubled. Items stay on 4/5/6 or their icons, with 0 to clear before charging. The skill and angle selected when you release determine the shot and its delay. A new turn starts on Normal.
Normal shots are the fastest, most efficient source of immediate damage. Secondary shots trade some of that efficiency for control or extra hits; Specials offer burst damage, terrain destruction or stronger effects at a longer delay. Shot-card delays and the queue always reflect the current balance values.
Special (SS) own-turn rule: each champion's first SS unlocks on their own turn 4. Firing SS makes it ready again on that champion's use turn + 4: use on turn 4, ready on turn 8; wait until turn 6 to fire, ready on turn 10. Skipping still counts as taking your turn; opponents' and teammates' turns do not count for you. The SS card shows the remaining own turns, and Tab / Shift+Tab skip locked SS without losing held power. Selecting, aiming, pausing or cancelling does not spend SS. This readiness rule is separate from action +delay and does not change turn order. Teleport is a Normal-trajectory item, not an SS, and does not spend SS readiness.
The turn countdown stays at the top-left. Health stays beneath each champion without duplicate cards covering the arena.
Items: each champion starts with one Dual, one Dual+ and one Teleport per match. Press 4 / 5 / 6 or click an item to arm it; click again or press 0 to clear it. Only one item can accompany a shot. Dual repeats the selected Normal or Secondary volley (+600 delay). Dual+ fires the selected Normal/Secondary volley, then the other (+250). Neither doubles Specials. Teleport replaces the shot with a harmless Normal-trajectory marker (+150 delay) and moves you to a safe supported landing nearby. An unsafe landing or a miss leaves you in place. Items are spent when you fire, including misses, never when selecting or cancelling a charge. A new turn clears the selection; stock refills only on a new match. These delay values are local balance choices.
The paired gold pointers follow your current charge. The solid red line records your last shot's power; the dashed white line is your independent target. Click, tap or drag on the bar to move the white line without changing the red one. Both belong to the active player and persist across turns; a new match clears them. The red line appears after your first shot, and the white line appears when you set a target. At the same power, the white dashes sit over the red line so both remain visible. These are references only, not automatic firing. When the target has keyboard focus, use arrow keys to adjust, Home/End for 0/100%, or Delete to remove only the white line.
Hits throw up dust, debris and sparks, without screen shake. Champions settle and tilt with their ground supports. The gun keeps its elevation relative to the champion, so damaged ground changes the actual firing angle shown beside AIM. Last angle beneath the slider remembers your own previous shot's actual firing angle, including ground tilt, until you fire again or start a new match. Re-aim after a crater changes your footing.
Champions ride floating skateboards with expressive idle blinks, hovering bobs, fluttering scarves and sashes, swishing tails and themed particles. Naruto carries a kunai, Subzero holds an ice shard and Goku gathers ki in his hand. These animate the artwork only; physics weapon pivots, shot origins and hitboxes do not move with idle animation. Movement effects follow actual travel, stop against walls and settle when movement stops. Pausing freezes animation, and the system's reduced-motion preference disables it.
Each champion's shots have distinct artwork: flames, electric darts, stone and seeds, fox spirits, water pearls, ki sparks, wind discs and ice crystals. Energy gathers as you charge, with a visual energy link from the held weapon to the unchanged simulation muzzle. Shots have animated elemental trails and special attacks have longer, distinct impact animations. These effects and weapon recoil are visual only: they do not change the launch point, hitboxes, damage, turn timing or camera. Reduced motion removes orbiting particles, animated trails and recoil, and replaces impact bursts with a subdued mark. Sound starts off: use the speaker icon for quiet, locally generated firing and impact effects. Pause, mute and new matches stop playing sounds immediately.
The bottom-left box says when the wind next changes, counting completed turns from both champions, including skips and repeat turns. A brief centre-screen notice shows the new direction and strength when the wind shifts, without blocking controls. The new direction and strength are rolled at that point, not predicted in advance; the same values can roll again.
True and weak angles: the forward aiming slice shows the selected shot's permitted gun elevation. Bright green is true angle (full damage, 1.00x); faded green is weak angle (80% damage, 0.80x). Some champions and Specials have an entirely true range. There is no extra damage bonus at 90 degrees. Turning mirrors the slice and ground tilt rotates it; the AIM number still shows the actual world firing angle. Changing shots clamps your aim to that shot's range. Dual+ uses the overlapping Normal/Secondary range and each volley keeps its own true-angle damage. Teleport uses Normal's range but never deals damage. These ranges reconstruct classic community references; the weak-angle factor and disputed historical entries are explicit local choices.
Movement automatically steps over shallow ledges and crater lips up to 24 world units high. Taller walls still block movement; walking off an unsupported edge causes a fall.
Pressing left or right turns your grounded champion and weapon to face that direction, even with zero stamina or when blocked by terrain. Turning costs no stamina; only movement does. Your champion keeps that facing when you stop and on your next turn. Gun elevation is retained, but the firing direction mirrors; check your aim before firing. Turning is locked while charging or resolving a shot, paused, or outside your turn. The CPU faces its opponent when its turn begins.
The circular wind dial shows strength from 00 to 26. Its arrow points where the wind blows, including up and down; at 00 the arrow is hidden. Wind acts throughout a projectile's flight: upward wind reduces its fall, downward wind increases it, and opposing wind can turn a shot backwards. Each champion responds differently; Goku has the highest base sensitivity and Ironman the lowest, with additional per-skill wind multipliers.
Wind strength increases the force evenly. Vertical wind is tuned to change a shot's gravity by at most 45% at maximum wind, so even light shots still have downward acceleration in an updraft. This prevents wind from cancelling gravity. Horizontal wind keeps its full champion/skill sensitivity and can still turn a shot back. The CPU uses the same force rules with its usual estimation errors.
Wind rerolls when a SHIFT weather phase starts, not every turn. Each phase lasts as many turns as there were players at match start (2 or 4), even after eliminations. The same wind can roll again.
Weather is always active: matches cycle through Force, Lightning, Recovery, Eclipse, Wind Shift and Clear. A Force crossing adds 20% damage once; Ironman's marker and actual intercepted ray must both cross. Lightning-charged projectiles call an extra terrain-blocked strike at impact, capped at four weather strikes per action. Recovery restores up to 60 HP on a living champion's own turn. Eclipse locks items, not Specials. These effects use explicit local tuning, not a recovered original server. Tornado and Thor weather are not included. The short muzzle guide shows direction, not the landing point.
Weather pillars: Force is a gold column of rising energy; Lightning is a blue electrical column. The visible boundaries and minimap bands mark their actual locations, not an arena-wide bonus. If the pillar is outside the camera, an edge arrow points towards it; View pillar pans there without moving your champion. Press C to follow the action again. Recovery and Eclipse remain global statuses without a column. Reduced motion keeps clear static pillars.
Drag the battlefield with the mouse or a finger to pan. Mouse wheel zooms around the pointer; middle-click resets to 100%. The - / percent / + camera buttons do the same from the centre of the view. Zoom is limited to 100-200%; use the minimap to see the whole battlefield. Manual view stays while you inspect the current turn or shot. The next shot, including an opponent's or CPU shot, resumes following without changing zoom. C or Follow resumes immediately. A new match resets following and zoom. Camera input is disabled while charging or paused. Dragging and zooming never fire or move a champion.
The top-right minimap shows a detailed miniature of the battlefield, including craters. Numbered circular badges identify each champion, a ring highlights the active one, and gold corner guides mark your current view; the area outside is lightly shaded. Click or drag it to scout; the header shows SCOUT or FOLLOW and the current zoom is below. Focus it and use arrow keys to pan, Home/End for the west/east edge, or C to follow the action. Flying shots have a short trail. Quartered HP bars stay beneath the champions.
48 distinct shots: hover or focus each shot for its rules. Pikachu's harmless markers call 3, 6 or 9 independently intercepted satellite strikes; the Special marker stops on terrain. Charizard launches one fireball, four diverging fireballs, or a marker that summons five converging mini-dragons. Ace has sequential impact stages and a 1.8s airborne transformation. Zoro's sword waves weave and split into six. Ziggs' bombs bounce, with a finite contact-damage window on the Special. Temari fires one wind cut, four trailing cuts, or a Special that transforms after 1.8s. Naruto uses Kunai, three Spiralling Shuriken, and a Rasengan that lands with six chakra bursts. Gojo's Blue pulls and Red pushes; War Machine fires missile salvos.
Temari's hooks and backshots: face away from the target when the wind blows towards it. Try 70 degrees and about 2.5 bars (62.5% charge). About one opposing horizontal wind unit activates the special wind response; changing the angle or power can switch between a forward hook and a returning shot. Upward wind gives more airtime, downward wind gives less. Returning hits behind the launch position gain 20% damage against enemies; weak-angle damage still applies. Shots may leave the map edge and return, but still have a finite lifetime. Calm, tailwind and low-angle shots retain their ordinary arcs. This is a community-guide-based reconstruction, not an exact original-game formula calibration.
Hit defense: Subzero's low-muzzle shots apply permanent 5/20-point reductions, capped at 50. Each point adds 1% to subsequent Hit damage; Energy damage is unchanged. These explicit classes and coefficients are Kabooom tuning. Splash can affect either side. The large snowflake's reduction area extends beyond its damage radius; true/weak-angle scaling affects damage once, not the defense reduction.
Orbital aiming: Goku's harmless markers call beams from one shared relay. Levels 1–6 require 0/250/650/1200/2000/3100 actual inflicted beam damage; ordinary beams do 80/100/125/155/190/230 direct damage, and the terrain-passing special calls a 2.2× beam once per enemy crossed. Ironman's technological satellite fires one downward beam, three upper-left diagonal beams with distance-based separation, or six tight vertical beams. Pikachu's red-white ball satellite fires its separate 3/6/9-strike kit. Neither personal satellite uses shared relay levels. Offscreen indicators show direction, not relocated sources. Every beam raycasts current terrain and bodies, including the shooter: a marker is not a guaranteed hit.
Ahri's Underworld Seed ignores bodies, reverses gravity after entering terrain and uses 1.75× underground lift for a smaller return arc. It bursts at the first exit through any surface without excavating a tunnel. Above-ground flight, damage and delay are unchanged. Phantom Fang ignores terrain for its whole flight but detonates on the first living body. Every shot has a finite lifetime. Status, relay level and terrain reset on a new match.
Design provenance: clean-room behavioural interpretations of publicly documented GunBound shot patterns, with original Kabooom art, code, damage, thresholds and world-scale tuning. Champion display names are user-selected aliases; no affiliation is implied. No original game code or assets are included; historical versions disagree, so exact emulation is not claimed. References: Armor, Turtle, Grub, Boomer, Ice, Aduka, Nak, A.Sate.
Reference review: all 24 shot patterns were checked against historical community guides. The selected wide Ice special (-20 Hit defense, cap 50) is an older variant; later guides describe a weaker version. Transformation, split and fuse times are chosen approximations, not official universal constants. Satellite heights, relay thresholds, damage and crater sizes remain original tuning. Goku's normal uses local electrical splash rather than an unverified-range chain; healing items, tornadoes and other weather mechanics are not simulated. No exact GunBound emulation is claimed.
Choose from two original 2,800-unit battlefields in setup: Skyfall Reach (the original four floating islands) or Ember Basin (five mineral islands, a high central plateau, low outer shelves and two narrow destructible crossings). Terrain and the minimap match the selected arena; every rematch restores it. New matches randomise all spawn positions and sides: nearby or far apart, without overlapping champions. Gently sloping ground and full-width clearance keep every starting position safe. Cancelling match setup preserves the current map, terrain and positions.
The CPU rolls a random champion for every new match. Easy makes frequent aiming mistakes, Normal is more consistent, and Hard is the most accurate, but none has perfect aim. Difficulty changes accuracy, not health or damage.
Use Menu to choose champions or play mode, create/join rooms and open room chat. Cancelling keeps your current match. The pause icon is available in offline matches; online turns cannot be paused manually. The speaker and fullscreen icons toggle sound and fullscreen. More options opens Help & controls. Controls stay visible while the map can extend beyond the viewport; the camera follows the active champion and shots.
The match menu combines Practice CPU, Local and Online play. Choose 1v1 or 2v2 separately under Match format. Online shows Create/Join first, then a full-window lobby: champions on the left, player slots and chat on the right. Match format, Arena, Ready and Leave room are grouped at the upper-right, wrapping on smaller screens. Connected rooms lock mode switching until you leave; during a match you can Return to match without leaving. Host rule changes clear Ready. Weather is always active.
Practice: all sixteen champions can be selected directly, with no Random choice. CPU players still roll random champions.
Local and Online: fourteen regular champions can be selected directly. Random rolls once per seat when a new match starts: 2.5% Pikachu, 2.5% Charizard, and 95% divided equally among regular champions. CPU players use the same odds. Online rolls are decided by the server, stay unchanged on reconnect, and reroll on a new rematch. The bonus pair are Random-only outside Practice.
Online 1v1 / 2v2: run start-online.cmd and open the game from its multiplayer server (locally, http://127.0.0.1:8878). Choose Online in the match menu, select the format, create a private meeting room, copy its invite link or 8-character code, choose champions and all required players press Ready. An invite link fills in the code but never automatically joins. Use a public tunnel link when inviting a friend outside your PC. Only the active living player can act. The server decides movement, charging, shots, terrain, wind and turn order; your red/white power references stay private to your browser.
The meeting room includes private room-wide text chat before, during and after a match: both players in 1v1 or all four players on both teams in 2v2. It is not private team chat. Messages are limited to 400 characters and four messages per five seconds; the last 50 remain in server memory while the room exists. Reconnecting and rematches retain that room history. Leaving closes the room for everyone and deletes it. Chat messages are rendered as plain text, not links or HTML.
Menu opens the meeting room and Return to match closes it. During online play, room chat stays open in the bottom-right HUD. The message bar stays above the scrollable history, with newest messages first. Escape from the chat returns keyboard focus to the battlefield without hiding the panel. Badges show unread messages when you are viewing older history or away, and drafts stay with the room when switching between chat and the menu. Forfeit requires confirmation and concedes your whole team, awarding the opposing team the win while keeping the room open for chat or a rematch once everyone is ready. Leaving is a separate confirmed action. Online turns do not pause for chat, Help or switching tabs; those actions stop movement and cancel your charge. Ping shows round-trip network latency. Render smoothing never alters combat results.
If a connection is lost, the match pauses for up to 60 seconds while that player reconnects. The connection indicator shows the remaining grace time; the server decides when it expires. Refreshing the same tab can recover its seat. The host PC and server must stay running; server restart loses matches and chats. A tunnel is a separate step and is not opened automatically.
Match finish: a short pixel KO cue marks a defeat. An offscreen defeat has an exit arrow, not a body moved back onto the map. In 2v2, play continues until one entire team is defeated. The result names the winner and both sides, or reports a draw or confirmed forfeit. Play again starts a fresh Local or Practice match with the same setup. Online Rematch readies only your seat; everyone must be ready. Room / chat opens the existing lobby and Return to result comes back. On small screens, post-match chat stays in the room so it cannot cover the result buttons. Leaving still requires confirmation. No damage or fall totals are estimated.
KABOOOM! / MATCH SETUP
Choose your champion. The CPU gets a random champion each match.
Random rolls - 2.5% chance for Pikachu & Charizard. Bonus Champions cannot be picked directly.
PRIVATE ONLINE 1V1
Create a private lobby or join a friend's room.
Choose the rules above, create a private lobby and send its code to your friends.
Enter the eight-character room code. No public matchmaking or automatic joining.
Join a room to chat with your opponent.