Lifish (a game similar to Bomberman)

[silverweed]

Hi, everyone!

I'm developing a game named "Lifish", which is meant to be an open source clone of an old MacOS-exclusive shareware game called "BOOM".

BOOM is a very fun game and one of the first games I've ever played, so I decided I'd try and create my own game taking inspiration from it.

It's nothing very fancy, but being my first time with SFML - or C++ graphical game development at all - I didn't want to bite more than I can chew

ATM most of the textures I'm using are taken directly from the original game, but I'll replace them with original ones as soon as the game itself works.

Here is a sample screenshot of the first level:

Game mechanics
As you can see from the picture, each level consists in a 15x13 grid where entities move; the players (currently up to 2) must kill all the enemies in order to advance to the next level. The way they do that is like in Bomberman: you basically deploy bombs to kill enemies and destroy walls (there are some differences though: for example, bombs don't block the transit and you start the game with a higher number of maximum bombs allowed: from 5 to 8 ).

The original game has 80 levels (with boss fights each 10 levels); Lifish is not restricted to stick with the same number though: it's really easy to mod the level set (it's plaintext in a JSON file).

Source code
The repository for the game is on Github; the game currently compiles and runs correctly, but many features are yet to be added (e.g. currently enemies don't even shoot you ), so it's not really interesting right now (moreover, textures taken from the original game are not included, since there may be copyright issues and I don't want to steal other people's work). I'm proceeding quite fast, though, so I hope the first release will come soon, hopefully before fall comes.

Stay tuned for updates! 

[fallahn]

Yay! This looks fun! (and a lot like bomberman ) Brings back memories... I would love a good bomberman clone on PC

[silverweed]

Updates!

Much progress was done on the programming side, and now the game is almost completed and playable - probably there's some fine-tuning needed, but it's working overall. Here is my "TODO list", and as you can see a good deal of the points are ticked

Still much work to do on the artistic side though: I still have to create the spritesheets for (at least) 10 enemies, several tilesets and so on, not to speak of the music and sounds - I'd like to have an artist do the music, but I fear I couldn't afford it.
That'll delay the first game release by a significal amount of time, even though the game mechanics work (for obvious reasons, I can't use BOOM's original assets in the actual release - which is what I'm doing for testing the progress).


Here are some pics and videos to get an idea of the current progress:

Level 1 - not much change since OP, but I've replaced the players with original sprites, and at least their spritesheet is fully done . You can also notice the new (placeholding) sidebar on the left.


A new tileset (i.e. level border, background and walls) I've made.


Yet another new tileset, plus the bosses shooting at our heroes!

Also have a couple of videos (no audio, sorry - I couldn't get Kazam to register the audio on my Debian laptop...I'll retry later on windows). As you can see at the beginning of the first video, the game is running very fluidly - shouldn't have FPS problems even on old machines - but that's probably SFML to thank rather than me

Note: Lifish currently builds on Linux, Windows, OS X and FreeBSD.

Until next time

[Mario]

For game recording, you might want to try Open Broadcaster. Getting it set up is a bit tedious, but once you're done, game recording should be rather easily, plus it records audio as well.

I'm not a fan of the current art style (feels a bit "mixed" to me), but ignoring that, nice game.

[silverweed]

For game recording, you might want to try Open Broadcaster. Getting it set up is a bit tedious, but once you're done, game recording should be rather easily, plus it records audio as well.

Thanks, I'll try it

I'm not a fan of the current art style (feels a bit "mixed" to me), but ignoring that, nice game.

Yeah, that's probably due both to the fact I'm using mixed original assets and ones taken from the game I'm copying (hopefully I'll create all the remaining ones soon enough), and the fact I'm not an artist and have never done pixel art before, so there's big room for improvements