VR game · Meta Quest · about 10 minutes a range
A bronze field gun stands on a hilltop beside a table of powder bags and cannonballs. Somewhere across the valley there’s a little wooden fort with a red flag. You load the gun by hand, crank the barrel up, swing it into the wind, and fire it by hitting the vent with a hammer. Then you watch the ball fly, and hear it land a second later.
Play Artillery (or walk through the red portal in the VR lobby)
Everything by hand
There are no buttons for the important parts. You pick up a cloth powder bag and hold it at the muzzle until it slides in. More bags, more range, up to five. Then a cannonball. Powder has to go in first, and the gun refuses a charge after the ball, the way the real thing would. A red crank by the breech raises and lowers the barrel, and a wheel just behind it swings the gun left and right. Brass signs on both show the angle. To fire, you pick up a hammer and strike the brass pin on top of the barrel.
With controllers the hammer snaps into a natural grip, and handles glow and buzz in your hand when you’re close enough to grab them. Anything that rolls out of reach can be pulled back with telekinesis: point at it and squeeze.
Real ballistics
The ball flies with gravity, air drag and wind, integrated a hundred and twenty times a second. Drag matters more than you’d think: aiming 45 degrees up is no longer the longest shot, and an eight-metre-per-second crosswind pushes a ball about nine metres sideways over 250 metres. A windsock by the table shows the wind. Its five bands work like a real one, each lifting at the next three knots until it’s fully out at fifteen.
After each shot a spotter calls the miss (“40 m short, 6 m left”) and a range card lists your last few shots with charges, elevation and traverse, so you can correct like a real gun crew.
Never impossible
Every range is random: the target is 90 to 340 metres away, up a hill or down in a valley, with any wind up to about 18 knots. Random can easily mean unhittable, so before a range is shown the game solves it. For each number of charges it scans the elevation, corrects the aim for the wind, and only accepts the range if some setting the gun can actually reach lands on the fort. Most ranges can be hit two to five different ways.
The first time
A short walkthrough points at each step with a bobbing arrow: grab a charge, load it, load a ball, wind the crank, turn the wheel, pick up the hammer, fire. It finishes once you’ve seen where your first shot landed.