Released Boulderdash - retro remake of the classic C64 game

Tony Brice

Member
I took inspiration from Mike Dailly's dev video creating a remake of Boulderdash a few years back and started working on my own version. I got it mostly done then forgot about it for a couple of years until I resurrected it recently to finish it off. Some elements are the same as the original - such as the map layouts - but I've made the game a little less challenging by adding stuff such as a timer toggle, 3 speed settings and a few other tweaks.

It's up on my Itch.IO page with all my other games - totally free of charge - and you can download either a PC or Mac version.

Please let me know what you think if you download and play it.

 

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Elodman

Member
Really Fine !!!
Thanx for the remake, hope its not your last one!!

Default ought to be:
- sound ON (blasphemy to deprive of it anyone)
- WASD (for new gen. kids)
- ESC - exit
- show vividly / separately the usable keys (esp. SPACE) on your itch page

Any dev. stats would you share (time used, lines of code, ...) ?
Did you copy the included caves tile-perfectly from the original ????!!!o_O
 

K12gamer

Member
Heard about the game...but surprisingly never played the original.
I have played games like Dig Dug which seem kind of similar.

I agree with @Elodman that ESC should be able to exit during gameplay.
Instead you have to press Q to quit...then ESC from the title screen to exit.

@Elodman I'm fine with the ARROW KEYS to move the character...WASD is awkward for me...
but WASD could be made available for players who prefer those keys.

Video of me playing your game:
I messed up on the 2nd level...At first I thought that moving box was a teleporter...then realized it's a bomb.

 

Tony Brice

Member
Really Fine !!!
Thanx for the remake, hope its not your last one!!

Default ought to be:
- sound ON (blasphemy to deprive of it anyone)
- WASD (for new gen. kids)
- ESC - exit
- show vividly / separately the usable keys (esp. SPACE) on your itch page

Any dev. stats would you share (time used, lines of code, ...) ?
Did you copy the included caves tile-perfectly from the original ????!!!o_O
Some of the graphics were from a sprite set I found online but they were a bit garbled so I did have to do some simple retouching. A lot of it was really easy to get up and running, such as the animated diamonds. I used the same method Mike Dailly did when he did a 2 hour video knocking up a basic game shell. His version was all tiles and I really wanted to do the same thing until I found that I couldn't really replicate the AI of the enemy fireflies and butterflies when the tiles did not have any kind of memory of what they were doing on the previous pass of checking each tile on the map to update it. This turned out to be the main reason why I left the game unfinished for a couple of years as I was pretty new to GMS 2 at the time, so complicated coding like having data stored separately for each enemy at the start of the level seemed like too much hard work. I could have got round that and made just the enemies objects looking back at it but, in the end, just converted everything to objects. Even the dirt squares, just for consistency.

As for the levels, yes, they were duplicated again from big sprites showing the whole cave overlaid onto a room and adding the rocks where they were on the sprite. Took a bit of time to get all 20 levels in, including the bonus stages, and I kept finding slight errors in them for quite a while afterwards when testing.

Your comments on the keys do make sense when I think about it. I'm compiling a few notes based on feedback wherever I've mentioned the game so will go back and rebuild for both platforms with changes such as these, and any bugs fixed.

I'm happy to give out as much dev information that people would find interesting. I mostly rewrote the game when I went back into it but there's still some of my old poorer code that remains. I just tidied it up a bit. I'm thinking of giving out the source code as another download on the itch page if there's a possibility that people would find it useful.

As for last remake, pretty unlikely. I've got seven gamemnaker games completed and online now. Six of those are indirect remakes of games like Spy Hunter, Centipede, Envahi, Rockman, Asteroids and, of course, Boulderdash. Two of these have even made me some cash from winning game-coding competitions so it's fair to say I'll be doing a lot more.

I agree with @Elodman that ESC should be able to exit during gameplay.
Instead you have to press Q to quit...then ESC from the title screen to exit.

@Elodman I'm fine with the ARROW KEYS to move the character...WASD is awkward for me...
but WASD could be made available for players who prefer those keys.

Video of me playing your game:
I messed up on the 2nd level...At first I thought that moving box was a teleporter...then realized it's a bomb.

Man, I loved watching your video. It's always surreal to see someone else playing your game. I tend to play super-fast going round the levels as I've been so close to the game for 3 years now. As you were moving around in that video I could almost imagine what you were thinking when you carefully moved a few squares, trying to avoid the rock puzzles, haha. But, yeah, those flashing square things are fireflies and the only good thing you can do with them is drop a nice rock on their heads. The one you were messing with doesn't even need to be released. The butterflies you encounter later do need a bit more thinking because they turn into diamonds when touching amoeba and falling rocks, and some of those diamonds will be needed to clear a level.

So, everyone else who's ever played the original, please have a go at my remake, if you have the time. It is completely free and I love feedback like this. Thanks to you all for playing.
 

Tony Brice

Member
Don't forget you can select the same caves from the title screen that the original C64 version allowed you to play. Also, if you can find it, then you can activate the cheat and select any one of the levels to start from.
 
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