What Is Barnstorm?
Barnstorm is a flying display for a crowd standing on ground you are trying not to hit. The aeroplane runs forward at 150 feet a second and never needs steering. Height is the only control you have, and it carries two jobs at once.
The first is the clock. With the stick centred the aeroplane sinks at 26 feet a second, so a display opened at 800 feet reaches the ground inside forty seconds. The second is the score, since everything the crowd pays is multiplied by how low the aeroplane was.
Gates arrive ahead of you as a stripe of ground 90 feet either side of a line. One press spends the gate nearest the nose. Inside the stripe it pays, outside it the gate is burned for nothing, and there is no second press on it.
Reading a Gate
- Press when the stripe reaches the nose. The two lines through the aeroplane are the window at the scale of the world, and the stripe is the same 90 feet on the ground underneath. When they overlap, the press is inside.
- A press always spends a gate. Press with a gate just ahead and you have spent it, inside the window or a foot outside. Press with nothing close and the gate you were saving is the one that pays.
- Aim at the line rather than the stripe. Dead centre at 200 feet of height paid 300. Nine tenths of the way out it paid 138, and the very edge of the window 122, which is 41 per cent of centre.
- Fly each gate at the height you want to be paid at. The same press paid 100 at the 600 foot line and 385 at 30 feet, a factor of 3.85.
How to Play
- Open the display and the aeroplane starts at 800 feet with the stick centred. Nothing holds it there, and it sinks at 26 feet a second from the first frame.
- Hold the up key, or the back button, to pull the nose up. Climbing spends speed, so the climb settles near 40 feet a second rather than the 92 the stick asks for.
- Hold the down key, or the forward button, to drop the nose. The stick asks for 168 feet a second down and the aeroplane runs to 250 flat out.
- Press space, or the stunt button, as a gate stripe arrives at the nose. One press per gate, taken once, inside the window.
- Watch the HEIGHT readout in the bar. It is the resource and the multiplier at once, and the dashed line marks the 600 feet above which the crowd pays no bonus.
- Fly until the aeroplane touches something. The card lists crowd points, clean gates, misses, the lowest pass and your best.
A gate turns up every 340 to 760 feet of ground, and the aeroplane covers 150 feet of it every second, so the decisions arrive close together.
Why the Height You Spend Is the Score
Most flying games keep the resource and the score in separate boxes. Barnstorm puts them on one readout. Four seconds at 30 feet measured 92.4 points against 24.0 at 600 feet, and an identical gate paid 385 against 100 at the ceiling.
That quantity is all that stands between the aeroplane and the end of the display. Left alone it settles at 25.97 feet a second of sink, which puts the ground 31.22 seconds away. The crowd stand then stands 40 feet up, the barn roof 74 and the pylon tops 170, so the band you can fly in is thinner than the band that pays.
Each pass is a spending decision with a floor under it. Feet given away to clear a pylon are income never earned, and the lowest pass on the card says how near the display came to finishing early.
What the Stick Actually Buys
Back stick does not produce the climb it asks for. The stick asks for 92 feet a second, and twelve seconds of holding it back measured 39.3 with the airspeed down to 54.3 from a trimmed 150.
It is a real climb and the only way upstairs, but it will not run away with you. Held back, the aeroplane settles near 40 feet a second rather than climbing forever, so pointing at the sky is no escape from a bad position.
Forward stick is the same trade reversed. The stick asks for 168 feet a second down and the aeroplane runs to 250 flat out. Speed arrives before height does, so a dive has to start with room underneath to finish it.
The Terrain, Piece by Piece
A little over half the gates have something standing under them. Over forty seconds the tests counted 10 set pieces under 15 gates, 368 to 738 feet apart, and all three kinds turned up at 40, 74 and 170 feet.
The crowd stand is 180 feet long and 40 feet tall, a low thing you can cross at almost any paying height. The barn is 90 feet long and 74 feet tall, the one that punishes a pass at head height. The pylon is 24 feet wide and 170 feet tall, a thin obstruction with a hard floor under it.
Terrain never decides whether you can score. It decides how low you are allowed to be while you do it. A gate over open ground pays 385 on the deck, and the same gate over a pylon pays what a gate is worth above 170 feet.
Barnstorm on a Phone
The stage is scaled from two axes deliberately. The world runs 620 feet across the picture whatever its width, so the aeroplane always sees the same stretch ahead, while the band from the ground to the 900 foot ceiling fits the height of the screen. Scale the lookahead from the height instead and a phone gives a fraction of the warning.
Everything works by touch and nothing needs a keyboard. Three buttons sit under the picture: stick forward, stick back and stunt. The stick buttons hold while a thumb is down. The stunt is a press, because a button that latched would hand a player a press they never timed.
On a small screen, watch the stripe rather than the aeroplane. The stripe is what moves, and the ladder down the left edge carries the height, keeping your eyes near the gate line rather than up in the bar.