Bugger! Unfortunately, development of the game went really slow. Biggest cause of this was that Arjan had to code the game in such a way that it works with DOS2 as well, so that the game can be played from harddisk too. And, unfortunately all Arjan has is a standard NMS-8250, and no DOS2! The emulator he uses to code Bombaman with also didn't have accurate DOS2 emulation, so that didn't help either. This definitely slowed development of the game, because of some nasty DOS2 bugs that were very hard to solve! Also, things seemed to be going weird on a Turbo-R as well, something that clearly didn't help speed up development either. In the end, Arjan borrowed my Turbo-R for some months to solve the problem, and all appeared to be fine.   MSL is in the house But suddenly, we had yet another setback, albeit a smaller one. Because of our ( weird?) idea that the whole should come on 2 disk, one for the FM version, and one for the Moonsound version, we had (and still have) a lot of problems with regard to diskspace. Because the Moonsound uses a lot of samples and 2 separate samplekits, there was quite a lot of overlap between these 2 kits, mainly with regard to soundeffects. Because of this, there was a lot of diskspace wasted. To solve this, Arjan had to do some more coding that didn't help speeding up development of the game. He created the MSL, or the Moonsound Sample Library, which basically is one big file with all unique sounds from the samplekits you used it with in it. Quite a nice feature, which did save us a lot of diskspace, but also cost quite a bit of time to make...   Let's bust some bits! Now all seemed ready to work on the game again. However, after a while of no weird things happening in the game, things started to go haywire again! Aaaaaaarrghh! After a lot of investigation and brainstorming, we decided to blame it on popcom, the cruncher we used. After some asking around, we heard of other groups having experienced problems with popcom as well, and we got another cruncher from one of those other groups. Arjan had a look at it, didn't like it enough, and in the end he decided to write our own cruncher for the game. After this cruncher, called BitBuster (available on our HQ) was developed, if was time to implement it in the game. Unfortunately, that also took quite some (boring) work, because all original files had to be retrieved from all kinds of obscure places, put together, and recrunched again. But, after some initial problems, all was implemented succesfully, and seems to work great! It definitely makes things a lot easier for us now, also because we can crunch the files on a PC now (in stead of with an emulator using popcom), which makes things a LOT faster.   Some screenshots Bombaman as it is now   What?!? There's more?! What? Do you think that's all!? Naah, no way! I could go on and on about Bombaman, so let's do that just now Arjan is not only coding Bombaman, but he's also busy developing on the Gameboy Advance. Besides coding on a fighting game in his limited free time, he also participated in a GBA development contest, dragging Robert and me along to create some graphics and music. We made a small Bombaman related demo for this GBADEV competition, and finished 12th out of the 55 participants! Not too bad, for a relatively small amount of work! You can check out the results of the 2002 competition here or download the file from our page.   Bombaman goes international Of course, working on a GBA demo didn't take up all our time! Soon after the GBA demo was finished, we had some more brainstorming about new features that could be added to the game. One of these was including translations of all texts in the game and demo's! When the game is finished, you will be able to play it in English, Spanish, Italian, Japanese and Portuguese! No Dutch here? Indeed, you are right about that. We had some talks about this too, but decided not to include a Dutch version because of lack of diskspace and because we just think that Dutch looks way ugly in games!   Some other planned features Of course, more stuff was added as well! We can't tell you a lot about it right now, but expect the game to have some nice bonuses as well! I'll only mention that there will be at least 2 secret bonus worlds, and besides that the game will feature a cool replayer where you can listen to the entire soundtrack (and possibly some bonus songs if we manage to squeeze them on the disk).   Previous page    (3/4)    Next page   © 1999-2004 Team Bomba