Happy Wheels

Happy Wheels
The Happy Wheels logo
Developer(s)	Jim Bonacci, Jason Schymick, Caroline Pham
Publisher(s)	Fancy Force, LLC
Engine	Box2D Physics Engine
Platform(s)	Web browser
Release	June, 2010
Genre(s)	Ragdoll physics

Happy Wheels is a ragdoll physics-based racing Flash game created by Jim Bonacci. The game features a relatively small cast of playable characters who use largely odd, often absurd vehicles to traverse the game's levels. The game has been available on Total Jerkface since of June 2010, but demo versions are also available on other websites. About 200-300 thousand play the game each day and over 6000 user levels are submitted a day.

Characters

Happy Wheels offers a variety of characters to choose from, including:

Wheelchair Guy

The character is portrayed as an stereotypical homeless old man in a wheelchair. The wheelchair has a gas/nuclear powered jet engine attached to it and when activated, it gives the player an unlimited turbo boost. He also appears in Divine Intervention, another game by Bonacci.

Segway Guy

Segway Guy is portrayed as a businessman on a Segway with an ability to jump. Segway Guy has weak legs which may break off if the player hits the ground too hard. He is also the heaviest non-obese character. His voice is used for Lawnmower Man, Explorer Guy, and the man of the Moped Couple.

Irresponsible Dad

A moustached man, portrayed as a father in his mid-to-late 30's who rides a bicycle with his young son in a child's seat in back. His son is left without any protective gear, hence the father's name, although the father himself does sport a helmet. The Irresponsible Dad also shares a unique ability with the Moped Couple that allows the father and son to be launched off the bike independently of one another. If the child dies while the father remains alive, he'll shout "Damn it!" in a considerably calm tone. His son is sometimes called Timmy or Jimmy.

Effective Shopper

This character is portrayed as an obese woman who rides in a motorized shopping cart with a basket filled with food items. This character can also jump by pressing the space bar. She is one of the heaviest characters.

Moped Couple

Based on Audrey Tautou's and Mathieu Kassovitz's characters in Amélie, the character is portrayed as a man who rides a moped and his presumed girlfriend riding pillion behind him. When the space bar is pressed and held, the player is given a temporary turbo boost that will regenerate within a few seconds.

Lawnmower Man

An obese black man who rides a green riding-mower, resembling a John Deere. When running over other characters or fruit, the mower shreds the other characters/fruit and can slowly pull them in, however it cannot cut grass. Lawnmower Man also has the ability to jump.

Explorer Guy

An Indiana Jones-esque character riding a mine cart. With the addition of this character the character developer, Jason Schymick added a new environment element to the game; a railing, in which when Explorer Guy is in contact with the rails, he can lock his minecart's wheels to the rail and ride it.

Santa Claus

For the Christmas season of 2011, Jim decided to add Santa Claus to his characters. Although similar to common depictions of Santa Claus, his sleigh is pulled by elves rather than reindeer. The player can still control the sleigh even if the elves or Santa are dead. Santa also has the ability to fly which is achieved by holding space.

Gameplay

Gameplay varies from level to level, but most of the characters control largely the same. The player always face to the right and their vehicles can move forward and backward and can rotate while aerial, with the exception of Segway Guy who always stays upright. Characters can also be ejected from their vehicles when the Z key is pressed, however after leaving their vehicle they lack the ability to stand upright or walk. They act as ragdolls who can take on one of four different poses using the arrow keys, the up arrow makes their body straightened with arms reaching upward, the right arrow key makes their body straightened with arms reaching forward, the left arrow key makes their knees and elbows both bent backwards as if in a crabwalk, and the down arrow key puts them in a fetal position. These poses cannot be broken unless the characters die, or the player released the key. A player's ragdoll can also grasp onto any surface with their hands with the spacebar after being ejected.

All of the game's levels (of which there are nearly a million) are user created, with the exception of a few created by Bonacci himself. Usually the goal of the levels is to simply get from the start to finish while remaining alive, but users have also made levels that use the game's physics engine for many different types of gameplay designs that were never originally intended for the game. The game features grotesque amounts of violence. Characters may be impaled by spike sets, crushed by large objects, shot to death by automated harpoon guns and crossbows, among other things. Every limb of a ragdoll can become torn off, and character's entire bodies can be crushed into small pieces of flesh. It is rare that a player will finish a level without losing at least part of their character's body.

Players also have the choice to upload replays of their level attempts to Total Jerkface's server. Replays can be viewed by everyone in the site's online community. A replay will contain the amount of time it took for them to finish if the player completed the level, effectively creating a scoreboard that players can use to compete for the fastest time. In an effort to save space for the server, these replays aren't recorded as video files and instead use the game's engine to recreate what the player did during that run. Effectively, updates to the game's physics engine have made older replays differ greatly from how they originally played out. These are listed as "inaccurate" replays. Inaccurate replays are also a result if they are viewed on a different processor than the original replay saver.

The Level Editor

The level editor (available in all versions, but is only fully functional in the full version), allows players to create custom levels of their own. Users are given a large variety of tools and objects to build their levels.

Shapes

Shapes consist of mainly circles, rectangles, triangles and polygons. Shapes can be toggled interactive or not, which means it can be set to either collide with anything or not. If interactivity is toggled, a new option appears, which is called "fixed". Fixed shapes cannot move and will not have any mobility applied to them. Unfixed shapes will have physics applied to them. If fixed is unchecked, another option will appear, called "sleeping". Sleeping items will not have any physics applied to them until something collides with it. Shape colors can be adjusted too, along with collision settings, density, coordinates and rotation.

Polygon Tool

The polygon tool is a new feature to the level editor. It allows players to create their own shapes and art by connecting lines together to form custom shapes. The polygon has a limit of 10 vertices when interactivity is selected and can only be drawn clockwise, but when interactivity is toggled off it has no limitations and has a maximum of 50 vertices.

Special Items

Special items is a category of Flash-made items in the level editor. These can include simple physical items like bottles, balls, TV sets, etc. Or more complex things such as wrecking balls, turrets, speed boosts, spike sets, canons, NPCs, finish lines, and much more.

Reception

Happy Wheels has gotten mostly positive reviews. The Indie Game Database Gives Happy Wheels a score of 3.3/5. A review by Mr_Seth on TIGDB calls the game "Juvenile, gory, sometimes quite tricky fun. If you still laugh whenever Kenny dies in South Park, you’ll enjoy this." Other critics described it as "the game where people are made out of hotdogs and held together with silly putty." Users have complained about the server often being laggy and freezing when loading levels due to high web-traffic.

See also

• Jim Bonacci

External links

• Happy Wheels
• Tvtropes Review
• Indie Game Database Review