Another week missed. Whoops, my bad. Anyways… we have some updates for you.

Bombseeker

We have made a lot of progress with our prototype of Bombseeker! It is now possible for players to mark suspected bombs and gain extra coins for each correctly marked bomb.

Marking a tile essentially disarms the tile completely and allows the user to walk over it freely. Players are currently given ten markers to mark the 10 bombs on the map. In the future, the number of bombs will be dynamic and you wont necessarily have enough markers to clear the entire map. However for now, you will be able to mark all bombs on the map.

Marking tiles also is a great way to gain coins. This is another reason that marking is so important, this game isn’t about getting to the other side of the map, its about clearing out bombs and that’s what you get paid for. Every bomb marked is another coin earned!

Another thing added was the ability to reveal all neighboring tiles at once. So if the player was standing on a 1, then they know that all neighboring tiles are safe to reveal and can reveal all of them at once by pressing the space bar.

This allows for much more rapid clearing of the map, revealing safe tiles much faster.

Also, I have been thinking about having an intro text screen, or a voiced over cinematic, in order to explain the backstory of the game. Whether we want this for Bombseeker or the RPG has yet to be determined. There’s a brief story:

For hundreds of years, the wild beasts tormented the lands. People were driven from large cities, finding safety in smaller settlements. Even then the wild beasts hunted the people of the lands searching for their next meal. The only way to defend against these beasts was through the use of traps. Every town, every village, did the only thing that was found to be effective; they buried bombs to be activated by pressure switches and motion detectors. This method of defense was passed from generation to generation. 

Eventually a resistance began to form, a leader arose, and the wild beasts began to get pushed back. After decades of war, the villages began to feel safe again and the bombs became unnecessary. It was then that a new generation of heroes arose; the Bombseekers. 

Bombseekers were members of the resistance who traveled around villages in safe zones disarming and removing the hidden bombs that have been placed over the years. For the first time in many people’s lives, it is finally safe to travel from village to village, at least it will be once the Bombseekers do their jobs.

What’s next? Before we move forward with releasing Bombseeker, there are a few things that we would like to do.

1. Refactor the codebase to improve organization and make the dynamic level generation better.
2. Reskin the entire game in new graphics. It would be amazing if we could get an artist to design sprites for the entire game. We would need to find an artist for that though.
3. Add music to the game. No one wants to play a game in silence.

Once we get the game onto the steam store, I think that we are going to have it listed for sale for $10. However, please don’t pay that. I want to post it at $10 so that we can consistently have it on sale for up to 80% off. Buy the game when it’s less than 5 bucks please. That’s what I think we want. I think.

Oh, download the prototype on my GitHub. And yes, I spelt playground wrong.

Wait, Did he say RPG?

There’s plenty of runway for us to work with on this original Bombseeker game. Meanwhile, there is the nagging voice in my head that keeps screaming about another version of this game. What if there were tiles that revealed hidden wild beasts? What if you had to use coins to buy weapons in order to defend yourself? What if you would accept specific quests and clear bombs for specific routes? That’s the idea that pushes me towards a RPG version of Bombseekers. The gears are turning on this idea.

Conclusion

We’ve had a lot of time this past couple weeks to work on things. Its been great to get the prototype working and in a playable state. We hope that we can keep this momentum going. Oh, and we still need to name our game studio. Help us out.

Go Forth and Be Awesome