I’ve always enjoyed video games and wanted to create my own.  I may never actually make one but at least this is a way to exercise my creative side.  My wish is to make a game called something like “Build the Biggest Boom.”  It would be a game all about the chemistry of fire and explosions.  It would start by teaching the player how explosions work, how they can be shaped to send their force in a specific way, and why some compounds explode while others don’t.  There would also be an element of simple engineering to create the devices which would how explosive charge and to detonate.  The game would proceed similarly to Kerbal Space Program where instead of trying to build rocket ships to go to the moon, you build bombs to create the biggest boom.  You do simple research which teaches you the basic chemistry of explosions and then put parts and molecules together in such a way to create bigger and bigger booms, both by creating better explosive materials (for instance nitroglycerin instead of gunpowder) or by making things explode more effectively (ex the shape of the bomb).  There could also be an element of designing explosives to fulfill a specific purpose, such as proximity fuses to only explode when near something or waterproof fuses to explode underwater.

That’s all well and good, but so far I’ve done only the following:

-Make a cube that goes up when space bar is pressed

-Make a box that creates cubes when return is pressed

-Spawn a bunch of going-up cubes with return, then send them up with space bar

-Created a ceiling to stop things from going up too far.  Turns out that to create a ceiling, you have to create a floor upside down.  Who knew

So I want each “cube that goes up” to eventually be a particle in an explosive reaction.  Instead of just going “up” I want them to gain a force proportional to all the other particles near them (as an analogy for every molecule releasing explosive energy) and therefore “explode” outward when the space bar is pressed.  From there I can do the stuff of having different particles have different explosive energies, and having shape charges and stuff.