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Chapter 1 – Game Design

While it is often fun to just start coding, the best games stem from a predetermined design. The design doesn’t have to be complete, but it should cover the basics of game play. In this chapter, we present our game design.

Our game is called Boulder Bombers Advance.

Like most games, the design basis for our game is not original. It is derived from an arcade game from the 70s* called ‘Canyon Bomber’ which was later ported to the Atari 2600. Still, this wouldn’t be Boulder Bombers Advance if it didn’t have something the previous ones didn’t, and our design includes several innovations in this area.

I should also point out that this is not my first time writing an adaptation of Canyon Bomber – it’s actually the third. The reason for this** is also the reason that this game makes for a good tutorial:

It’s dead simple.

Because of this, the game play mechanics won’t take up a lot of our time. And so, without further ado, here is the game design:

In our game, the player controls a plane flying above a canyon full of rocks. The object of this game is to clear the canyon of rocks. This is accomplished by dropping bombs from the plane.

Points are awarded for rocks based on how far down the canyon the rock was at the start of the level. The top level rocks are worth 4 points, middle level rocks are worth 8 points, and bottom level rocks are worth 12 points.

Special power-up rocks are also present in the canyon. If the player hits one of these rocks with their bombs, they are awarded a super-bomb. Super-bombs cause larger explosions than regular bombs – thus they clear out many rocks around where they hit, not just the rocks that they actually touch.

When all of the rocks in the canyon are cleared, the canyon is refilled and the cycle begins again, just a little bit faster.

The player’s plane flies over the canyon from left to right, then from right to left, and so on. The player has only limited control over the plane. Using the D-pad, they can make the plane ascend and descend within a limited range and accelerate and decelerate for a short period of time. The A button is used to drop a bomb and the B button is used to drop a super-bomb. The game may be paused by pressing the START button.

At the start of the game, the player has 3 bombs. Every time the player hits the A button, the number of available bombs is decreased by 1. If the bomb hits a rock on its descent, the number of available bombs is increased by 1. If the player allows their plane to fly all the way across the screen without dropping a bomb, the number of available bombs is decreased by 1. When the player’s score reaches 1000 points and at every 2000 point increment thereafter, the number of available bombs is increased by 1.

The game is over when there are no bombs falling and the player has no bombs remaining – regardless of whether they have any super-bombs.

Footnotes

* Yes, I’m old enough to have played Canyon Bomber at the arcade

** My previous implementations of Boulder Bombers were done to test out routines or libraries I was working on. The first was done in 1985 on the Atari 800 and was published in Analog #30. The second was done in 1993 for my Mode 13H PC library and was never released.

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