Every Wednesday seems to come faster than the previous. But we have updates for you. Sadly, or maybe excitedly depending on what you care about, all of the updates we have for you today are from Bombseeker. So lets dig into it.

Bombseeker

As we move from the public prototype and towards to version that will make it to market, we continue with our complete refactor. We are still using the publicly available assets, which we would like to change sooner rather than later. However, we are still moving towards a finalized product.

Configurable Maps

We decided to build a complex map generator that would accept a config node as input and then build the map based off of that config. This allowed for us, for the first time, to build a static level.

This code allows for us to set fixed map sizes and fixed bomb locations. The above code generates one of our tutorial levels where there is a 3 by 3 grid with a bomb in the middle tile.

However, we still want to have flexibility and the ability to randomize levels. So we needed to expand this level generator to increase that flexibility. And we are abl to do just that. With the same level abstract, we can configure a randomized level with certain constraints. In the below, we have maps up to 10 by 10 with 50% of the tiles being bombs. That same randomized level could be as small as 4 by 4 with only 5 bombs.

Explosion

This is so minor but its cool for us because we’ve never done anything like this before. Bombs have an explosion animation when you step on them.

That’s all for that. Add 1 to the wins column.

Player Health

An important item for us in this refactor is the idea of Player Health. In the prototype, there was no concept of health for the player, instead if the player stepped on the bomb, then the level ended automatically. However, this didn’t allow us the freedom that we wanted. Enter Player Health.

Adding Player Health allows us more freedom when we get into the game play mechanics. For example, now bombs do damage to players and instead of having them kill the player immediately, we can have the player health above the value of damage that a bomb would do. This would allow for players to survive multiple bomb explosions prior to the level ending. We might not ever use this that way, but we have the freedom to if we wanted.

This feature also allows our game to have other ways that a player might get damaged. Introducing Player Health now will allow for the freedom in the future.

Borders

Another minor thing that we’ve locked down is the level borders. There are now generated borders for every map size that prevent the player from moving outside of the designated maps.

Conclusion

The goal continues to be take this game to the Steam store and we make more and more progress every day. We now have the internals to make various levels for players to play, starting with a tutorial series and a campaign series. If somehow we could team up with designer to make assets for us, then that would really be exciting for us. However, if we get everything done and have to move forward with these assets then we will. We are excited for this game to be available and we can’t wait to introduce you all to this world.

Go Forth and Be Awesome!