Megabonk is still relatively new as of this posting, and the community is still discovering how things work. In this time, however, there has been some misconceptions being spread about how the movement in particular functions, and how to abuse it. I hope to use this guide to clear up those misconceptions, and hopefully help people go woosh even faster.

The first thing we can all agree on, however, is this: Turning while holding a movement key causes you to gain speed. People have taken notice of this and come up with all kinds of wild theories about how it works. Here's a shortlist of things you or others may think to be true, but actually aren't completely accurate:

• How it works in Megabonk is not the same as strafe jumping in Quake, air strafing in Source games, or similar derivatives, despite what some may say. Both gaining and maintaining speed work differently to what you may be used to in other games.
  
  • In fact, you do not even need to strafe to gain speed by turning. You can do it when holding only forward, for example.
    
  • Nor do you need to turn the camera in the direction you're accelerating to gain speed.
• You also don't need to quickly toggle crouch (slide) to gain speed, and you can't gain speed by bunnyhopping. Though, there is some nuance to these techniques for maintaining speed that we'll cover later.
  
• Some characters can also gain speed while grounded and don't need to be airborne.

The above may surprise you, or you might not believe it. But all you have to do is try some of the below techniques, and you'll see there's some truth to it.

And if you have no idea what air strafing or strafe jumping is in the first place, here's an in-depth video overview on the history and inner workings of it. I'd recommend a watch even if you don't play games where it's possible to air strafe, since a lot of games (such as Megabonk) have mechanics that are inspired by or similar to it. This TF2 guide is also a good text-based overview.

This guide was inspired by this one here:

https://psteamcommunity.yuanyoumao.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3575226808

It has some useful game-specific knowledge that I chose to exclude, so go check it out too.

Before we start, there are a few things you should be aware of.

First, make sure SETTINGS > GAME > OTHER > Debug Speed is enabled. This will show your current speed in the bottom left of the screen. You can watch this number while performing maneuvers to confirm if you're gaining speed or not. Note that this shows your lateral/ground speed—rising and falling are not taken into account.

Next, note the three different directions (vectors) that we will be considering in this guide:

• The direction your character is currently moving.
  
• The direction your camera is facing.
  
• The direction you are accelerating/want to move, due to your held movement keys or the direction of your joystick. This is relative to your camera direction.

Let's start with the most basic, fundamental utility when it comes to movement in Megabonk: Moving diagonally (such as by holding your forward and left movement keys) will cause you to move faster than in a straight direction. For that reason, you should always be moving diagonally to move instead of straight.

This is similar to how movement worked in the original Doom: the game would add speed to the player directly based on which keys were being held down, rather than compute the desired acceleration direction and push you in that direction with a linear force. The former would essentially add speed to you twice, while the latter would always have you move at the same speed regardless of which keys were held. I don't know if that's exactly what's happening in Megabonk, but the end result is similar.

The difference is rather staggering, and you won't be able to go back once you try it yourself.

But we can go even faster. While the above is limited by your base movement speed stat, there is a way you can gain speed infinitely. And the faster your movement stat, the faster you gain speed.


Try this to see it in action:

1. Start moving forward, hit your max grounded speed, and jump.
   
2. Turn your camera so that you are looking 30 or so degrees to the left or right, compared to your direction of movement. We'll call this your turn angle.
   
3. Slowly increase your turn angle past 30 degrees. You will start gaining speed in the direction you first turned the camera.

Those familiar with air strafing as mentioned earlier might see the similarities. But I put this section title in quotes for a reason: it's not true air strafing.

Compared to traditional air strafing:

• Megabonk requires far less of the player to get effective speed gain: strafing not required, and the angles needed are more forgiving.
  
• There is no way to quickly turn on a dime, you are generally locked to your pre-existing velocity with only slight possible changes. Without slowing down, at least.
  
• You can do it while grounded with some characters.

Yes, you heard that right, characters that aren't lame and don't walk around like nerds, such as the most excellent Calcium and cool but edgy Tony McZoom, can also gain speed while on the ground. Though, do note that ground friction will cause you to gain speed slower than in the air, and will cause you to decelerate down to your normal move speed if you aren't otherwise gaining speed. Suffice to say, drifting makes you go faster. Ironically, you can do this on a real skateboard too by pumping.[en.wikipedia.org]

Still, cool right? Using this technique is critical in all stages of the game to ensure your survivability, and to get as much loot on the map as possible before you trigger the boss.


But once you start gaining speed, you'll need to keep these concepts in mind to ensure you don't stop doing so:

• The sweet spot for your turn angle to gain the maximum amount of speed seems to be 45 degrees or so.
  
• Don't increase your turn angle past 60 or so degrees, as that will start slowing you down.
  
• Since the speed (X/Y velocity) you gain will be in the direction you first turned the camera, your movement direction will shift toward it. You'll need to continually adjust your turn angle to keep it in the sweet spot.
  
• The exact deadzone angle, sweet spot turn angle, and maximum turn angle will shrink as you go faster; you'll get a feel for it as you explore.

Do note that while your turn angle is in the deadzone, it will not affect your air momentum. You won't gain or lose any speed when in this range, whether turning the camera or not. This makes gaining speed pretty forgiving, since moving your camera too slowly will only result in you not gaining speed with no other downside. Naturally, this doesn't apply to the non-walking characters while grounded: You will decelerate if you aren't moving the camera enough to gain speed, due to ground friction.

Something that might seem counter-intuitive, especially if you're used to Quake or Source Engine air strafing, is that you don't have to rotate the camera in the direction of your turn to gain speed—you will regardless of if you're rotating into or away from your turn, as long as the turn angle stays around the sweet spot. Let me restate for you Half-Life players in the back: As long as the camera is turning at all, in either direction, you'll be gaining speed. You can even quickly wiggle it left and right around the sweet spot, and it will still work. This flies in the face of traditional air strafing, where you must turn the camera in the same direction of your movement to gain speed.


Being on the ground has your character affected by ground friction, and they will always be trying to slow down to either your normal movement speed, or to a complete halt if you aren't trying to move. When landing, it's imperative to try and prevent speed loss from this friction.

The game can do one of two things when you land. If you're crouched, you'll start sliding when you hit the ground, and sliding will immediately cause you to start losing speed. But if you're not crouching, you'll have a few frames when you hit the ground where you won't lose any speed at all, before ground friction starts slowing you down.

So if you want to keep as much speed as possible on flat surfaces or up slopes, don't slide and jump as soon as you land. Jumping when you land is known as a bunnyhop.

In some games, bunnyhopping increases your speed—this is not true in Megabonk. All it does is help you maintain speed, so don't feel bad if you're bad at it. In the end, it's much more efficient to slide and lose a little bit of speed with a mistimed bunnyhop, than it is to not slide and lose all your speed with one. This becomes much more true as your movement speed becomes faster, and it becomes more difficult to match jumps with the terrain you're speeding over. The speed you lose will also become more negligeble as your overall speed becomes greater.

However, do note that crouching/sliding reduces your acceleration greatly, including your air acceleration—though it doesn't affect the speed you gain from turns. So, if you're at a dead stop or need to slow down to move in another direction, make sure to uncrouch first. I would also recommend you not crouch or slide for your first few bunnyhops, it makes getting up to speed easier and more consistent.

Also, if you're going into a downward slope, you'll most likely gain more speed sliding down it than you will in the air, so slide down them without jumping if you can. If your movement speed stat is crazy high though, you may not need to do this.

I would also recommend leaving CONTROLS > Hold Crouch enabled, if you either don't want to bother with perfect bunnyhops and always want to slide, or simply aren't very good at it and don't have much choice. As I mentioned, there is little benefit in uncrouched bunnyhops, especially once you get up to speed. I personally prefer the consistency and forgiving nature of slidehops not immediately killing all your speed you so carefully built up if you miss a single input. Of course, over-reliance on sliding may cause you to get rusty... So do as you think best. Maybe try to mix it up based on the situation.

So far, we have assumed you will be moving forward, e.g. by holding the forward key, while... What should we call it, drift boosting? Sure, while drift boosting. But what if you want to combine it with diagonal movement, will you go faster? Can you drift boost in another direction than forward? The answer to these questions is yes, and while it is quite simple, it isn't to explain, and it can be tricky to execute properly.

By this point, having watched the videos I linked up top will greatly assist in understanding the mechanics explained below. If I were so inclined I'd make a video myself, since graphs would probably help.

The most important thing to remember is that your acceleration direction (or, your desired movement direction) is always relative to the angle of your camera. Keep that in mind, and let's set up an example to demonstrate how it works.

So, say your camera is facing north, and you aren't moving. Pressing the left movement key or moving your joystick left will cause you to start moving left, to the west. But if you turn your camera to the right, so that you're now facing east, moving left will now have you move north. By turning your camera 90 degrees to the right, from north to face east, the direction you'd go by moving left also rotates 90 degrees to the right, from west to north.

We can also apply the inverse of that example. Say you're moving north, your camera is facing north, and you want to look to the east to the right of you. To do this without slowing down or changing the direction you're moving, you'll have to let go of the forward movement key and start holding the left movement key (the same on joystick as moving it from pointing up to point left), while turning your camera 90 degrees to the right. The end result is that you'll be moving north still, while your camera faces east. In effect, you've rotated your movement direction 90 degrees to the left, while rotating your camera 90 degrees to the right, so that you're looking to the east while still moving north.

Hope that made sense. If you're a seasoned gamer, you probably already understand this on a deep muscle memory level, even if you've never put it into words before. Try moving around in game while looking around and re-read this part if you're still having trouble understanding.

The reason I bring this up is that you must apply this knowledge to drift boosting if you want to use it while moving in another direction than forward.

Funnily enough, we can reference this video (I'm not calling it a "short") uploaded by Megabonk's developer to see an example of what I'm about to talk about:


See how the player shifts the camera to the left and right between jumps? What they're doing is alternating between forward-left and forward-right acceleration directions. But to make sure that the new direction they're accelerating in is the same direction as they're already moving, they are moving the camera to compensate for it.

In short, always make sure to rotate your camera to face the inverse of your acceleration direction, to maintain your speed. Combine this with drift boosting, by slowly moving your camera to either the left or right once you move the camera in the right direction, and you can continue gaining speed.

Note that, as I explained in the first section, you can drift boost by moving the camera in either direction, regardless of what your acceleration direction is or what movement keys you're holding. Experiment and find out what works for you! I personally like shifting directions when landing, like the player in the video.

This is all very preliminary research done by one dude with low playtime. If you have any corrections, please leave a comment.