I started working on a Boulderdash remake back in 2017 and it was pretty much one of my first games that I worked on solo when I switched to working with Gamemaker Studio 2.

Readers who’ve seen some of the first blog entries here will have seen that I was actually going guns blazing putting the game together until I got distracted by competitions and other ideas and kind of left it by the wayside when it was almost finished. At the time the game had a couple of elements like the amoeba and the magic walls still to go in but the biggest issue I was having was implementing the fireflies and the butterflies AI into the game.

I’d have to read back the earlier blog posts to see how much of this I went into back then but the main issue was that I’d been using tiles for all of the game elements, rather than objects, and I’d come up stuck with not being able to have code elements on the enemy tiles so they knew both where they had been and where they were going.

A simple idea would have been to flip them out into objects and removing the tiles for them so they could work with collision checks against tiles still, for interacting with other gameplay elements, but would have their own AI system coded into their step event and meant each one had individual control.

Aaron helped me out with the start of implementing this but we moved further in starting a branch of the code to work with a complete object system instead of tiles. For some daft reason I was even contemplating redoing the already completed tile maps as object layouts instead when I just needed to do a bit of processing as each map loaded to delete the tiles and put an object version down instead. Needless to say I was a lot wiser when I came back to the project and finished it.

Anyway, to sum up, the game is finally complete and up on itch.io with the rest of my work. I could do a lot of waffling about the rewrite of probably around 90% of the code to get it over the line but that is for another day.

I only published the Mac version of the game online yesterday and got the Windows build up this evening but it’s already picking up quite a bit of traffic which is very interesting. People obviously still remember the classic games to this day and I’m modestly claiming that my remake isn’t bad either. Go see for yourself…

https://xerra.itch.io/boulderdash

Categorised as: Boulderdash | Development | Game Studio 2