From Bomberman to Bombaman Back to the original subject now... When Arjan started the game, now already about 4 years ago, there was no foreseeing that the game would be this big! Initially the game just started as a simple multiplayer game, but as more people joined the team, a of of things have been added to the game as well. Unfortunately, because of the way the game was started, it became quite frustrating to add all these new things to an already existing and working game engine. You can read more about that somewhere below.   Single player mode appears... After Arjan and I decided that it would be cool to have a single player mode in the game, Robert joined us. Besides making the graphics for the game, Robert is also somebody who thinks up a lot of additions to the game. He's the one that said 'hey, wouldn't it be cool to have bossmonsters? I've drawn one for you, here', and suddenly, Bombaman featured bossmonsters as well! Around this time, the game had been renamed from just Bomberman to Bombaman as well. This all happened when Robert sent Arjan and me a ZIPfile named bombaman.zip. Back then I said 'hey, isn't Bombaman a cooler name than this boring old Bomberman?', and after some more talk we had an 'original' title for the game! A bit later, we also decided that the game should have a storyline. Indeed, a storyline in a game as simple as Bombaman! Because of the storyline (which will be quite a lot like an RPG story!), we also decided it would be a good idea to include some villages in the game, to enable us to expand the storyline a bit. With these villages we can also do some other extra stuff, but more about that later! At the moment of writing this, Arjan is busy on coding the villages, so people can walk around there, and read texts and things like that.   Some Bombaman screens from around 2001   Make levels?! How?! With what?! At some point in making the game, it became clear that we needed a level editor to make all the levels (60 in total) for the game. After some discussion we decided NOT to make an MSX editor, but a Windows editor. Most people have access to a Windows machine anyway, and apart from the fact that making an MSX editor would take a lot of (valuable) time better devoted to programming the game, a Windows level editor gave us a lot more freedom and userfriendliness than an MSX editor could give us. After we decided on the Windows editor, called bombed, Arjan started coding it. By now, the editor is already finished, and you can download an (old) preview version of the editor from our homepage. When the game is finished, we will make the editor available to you on our HQ, so everybody can create their own levels for the game! We've already added an option to our homepage where you can place, rate and download custom made levels, and we're hoping that this will boost people's creativity and that there will be a lot of homebrewn levels for our game. Of course, the editor will feature an extensive manual as well to make things as easy and accessible as possible.   It's all about gameplay Around this time we were having one of our normal discussions about the game in #msx again, as usual. After some random talking with JPR, our level designer, we came to a certain point where we were talking about leveldesigning and King's Valley 2 as a great example of that. At some point we were talking about different game styles and level styles, and came to the conclusion that King's Valley 2 had puzzle levels, whereas a normal Bomberman game mostly has action levels. After some more elaborating on this, one of us (I think it was me) had the idea 'hey, why can't we include some puzzle elements into Bombaman?'. Well, of course it wasn't a completely new idea; during on of the real life meetings we occasionally have (the bombameets), Robert already mentioned it would be cool to have some small puzzles in stead of normal stages in the game. Unfortunately, that idea didn't make it in the game (like a lot more wild ideas we had and still have). Anyways, JPR already had some puzzle-like levels at the time, but we decided to take it one step further. The game objective of King's Valley 2, to collect all the gems, would be a cool addition to Bombaman too! And so it was decided to add a game mode to Bombaman where the player doesn't have to just kill all enemies (which is the default Bomberman game mode) but where the game objective would be to collect all gems in that level, while at the same time avoiding and killing all the enemies that are in the way. And, while we were still in this brainstorming mood, we came up with yet another derivative gameplay mode, a game mode in which the objective is to destroy all special crystals. These new game modes, although relatively simple, added a new dimension to the game, and made the process of creating levels (and playing the game!) a lot more fun!   Bombaman is like a drug! All in all, since JPR joined the team, the gameplay of Bombaman has been given an enormous boost. Since we have a dedicated person working on creating levels and informing us of points that could be better, the game has become much and much better. To illustrate: I got a betaversion with all levels that were more or less finished in it, and was asked to test it for a bit. Even though I receive a lot of beta's of the game, I mostly test small things (bugtesting, new things, etc), and as such I didn't have a good look at the real levels in the game yet. When I got this version with all levels in it I decided to have a good look at it. I started playing, and playing and playing. And guess what? The game proved to be very addictive!!   Bombed, the Bombaman level editor   And we keep on adding stuff for free... we must be TellSell! To achieve this level of gameplay, more elements besides the game modes mentioned above were added. One of these was adding more different enemy types; now there's 12 different AI types to choose from. Also, new items were added, and some existing items were modified a bit. Another important part is the use of teleports into the game! There was a lot of discussion about this, mostly with Arjan about 'I can't implement this in the game anymore, it's too hard to add new features now', but after some more nagging, he added it anyways. The final important element was the addition of the 'special object'. Since some of the later levels are very hard (to illustrate, even JPR needs an hour to finish a single level!), we came up with the concept of a 'special object'. You receive such an object in each world, and with this object, you can make things a bit easier to pass a hard stage: if you use a special object in a level, you can play that level over and over again, without loosing any lives! Of course, we could have just made the levels simpler, but who likes a game that can be finished in two hours   Previous page    (2/4)    Next page   © 1999-2004 Team Bomba