v2.0 released of: a Boulder Dash clone with retro graphics and sound

[Irmen de Jong]

On 06/09/2017 23:17, Irmen de Jong wrote:

> 
> https://github.com/irmen/bouldercaves
> 

My Boulder Dash clone is now at version 2.0 because a few important things that were
lacking are now implemented:

* authentic mode:
The game is now displayed in a small screen that scrolls smoothly over the level, like
the original game. It also has the retro c-64 color palette enabled. You enable this via
a command line option.

* pre-recorded demo:
If you press F9 or wait a while at the title screen, the game plays back a prerecorded
demo of cave A, like the original game.

* synthesized sounds:
Instead of using sampled sounds you can now run the game with a software sound
synthesizer that creates the sounds in real time, including the title music. I've tried
to simulate the sounds of the original game but ended up with slightly different ones.
Maybe I'll tweak the synth to make them closer to the original, but there's a charm to
the variation as well I think.


All in all I am very pleased with the results. I didn't expect it to be possible
creating a decently performing arcade game using just the bare essentials:
- default tkinter to draw everything on the screen
- pillow to load images
- sounddevice to play sounds (optional).

I posted this update because I now consider it a full game [1] and I think it's
interesting to see that this can be realized in Python without any of the specialized
'game libraries' (pygame, etc) being used. While tkinter sometimes has troubles updating
the screen at 30 hz, the Python code itself is barely breaking a sweat, even the sound
synth.


Have fun
Irmen de Jong


[1] full game: errr... there's still no highscore table. Sorry :)