GID j - 3D Multiplayer Bomberman

It's been a while since I've actually taken part in a GID so this weekend I thought I'd go a little bit mad. Unfortunately, I was out all day Saturday so I only had Sunday to work on it.

I've been thinking about making a bomberman clone for a couple of weeks, so for a change I actually had a game idea. I was originally going to make it with T2D, but decided that animation and networking would be too much work to get working properly during the GID. It had to be multiplayer or it would suck, so T2D went out the window.

So, I decided to use TGE. On Friday night I spent a couple of hours getting a subversion repo setup and exporting a couple of crates. I also doodled a rough idea of how I wanted the level, which looked like this:




It's fairly simple: # indicates a solid block, P a player spawn point, . areas to not spawn crates, and spaces are places that it can spawn destructable crates. After that, I went to sleep.

When Sunday came around, I figured that that easiest way to get a level going would be to write a little loader for my doodle so I could use it as the final level. This proved to be an awesome time saving idea:



A few minutes later I had all the stronghold stuff removed and a flat terrain. It started to look like a real level:



Then I added spawning for breakables:



I then asked Nauris to do me a couple of textures so that it didnt look quite so naff and added bombs. The closest thing to a bomb I had was a bong model that Defoc8 made for me for a previous GID, so that went in as a placeholder bomb.



At this point the breakables were still just static shapes and not breakable. So, I fired off an email to Brian Richardson, who I've worked with on previous GIDs, and who has some awesome 3ds/dts blowing up code. Brian kindly agreed to help me out and stick that code in. While he was backporting that from the TSE GID we did a while back, I added a multishot power up:



And then it all fell together:




As it turned out, it's a fairly complete gameplay prototype. The only things missing are game end conditions and a round timer. Sure, it's really rough and the camera kind of sucks, but it works and there are no limits to the number of players. It's a lot further along then I thought it would be when I started it, and total time was roughly 12 hours.

I'd just like to thank Brian again for his help. At the time he joined in, I was really burnt out and it was the push I needed to get it done. Without his help, it would be nowhere near as complete. And the crates would probably still be indestructable ;-)