Re: ANN: Boulder Dash in OCaml

Couldn’t let it rest, so I’m (already) announcing version 2 of it — now a much improved, practically feature-complete reimplementation of both Boulder Dash 1 & 2.

Version 2 was an excuse for me to mess around with the OCaml bindings to popular graphics engines, and as a result, it now comes with 3 backends to choose from:

1. the homely bare OCaml Graphics library (https://github.com/ocaml/graphics),
2. the TSDL binding to the SDL2 API (https://github.com/dbuenzli/tsdl),
3. the binding to the Raylib engine (https://github.com/tjammer/raylib-ocaml).

The list is in order of increasingly better user experience, for the price of a potentially harder build experience. In theory, all versions should run on Windows, Mac, and Linux, though I was too lazy to test all combinations, and I (or my opam) had trouble installing some of the dependencies on some of the systems.

Features:

* Faithful original physics, graphics, animations, sound, and music
* Authentic scrolling mechanics combined with dynamic resizing
* All 40 levels and 5 difficulties of Boulder Dash 1 & 2
* Pause-and-go mode for relaxed playing

Relative to the previous release, version 2 adds the following niceties:

* Support for SDL and Raylib engines, which allow all of the following
* Original sound effects and music
* Original level color schemes
* Full screen mode
* Faster graphics
* Dynamic graphics scaling adjustment
* Gamepad/joystick support as well as more precise keyboard controls
* Boulder Dash 2 levels and decoder

Almost looks like a real game now. One from the 80s anyways. :)

Enjoy,
/Andreas


> On 12. Nov 2024, at 16:55, Andreas Rossberg <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
> Boulder Dash(*) was my favourite computer game in the 8-bit era, first released on the Atari 400/800 in 1984. Though I never owned an 8-bit machine myself, I had friends that I annoyed enough to let me play it on theirs.
> 
> As a homage to its 40th anniversary, I put together a fairly faithful clone of the original game, implemented in just a few 100 lines of bare OCaml, with nothing but the homely Graphics library. It should run on Windows, Mac, and Linux, though I was too lazy to test the latter.
> 
> Features:
> 
>    • Faithful original physics, graphics, and animations
>    • Authentic scrolling mechanics combined with dynamic window resizing
>    • All 20 levels, including intermissions, and 5 difficulties
>    • Pause-and-go mode for relaxed playing
> 
> It is open-source here:
> 
>    https://github.com/rossberg/boulder-dash
> 
> Enjoy!
> 
> /Andreas
> 
> (*) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boulder_Dash_(video_game) 
>    "Boulder Dash" is a trademark of BBG Entertainment
>