I’ve started making this game at the end of 2024, when I received the little console as a much-appreciated gift. It’s a lot of fun to develop for such a tiny platform!
The SDK feels minimal in a good way, in that it lets you focus on developing the game without extra steps or complications. The limited power of the console forces you not to overscope and it challenges you both on a creative and a technical level. Best of all, you can develop the entire game in C without extra bells and whistles.
In other words, Playdate is great!
The game (name to be disclosed in a future post) may be categorized as an action shooter with stealth elements. You control Holly, an ultra-skilled special agent at the service of an unspecified government’s military. She’s also a goat.
Here’s a brief video of how the game looks and plays (some of the art is still temporary):
Your mission is to recapture a top-secret military base from the hands of a terrorist group known as the Cyber Lizards. The game loop is as simple as “kill enemies, reach the exit, repeat”, but the fun comes from the many ways you end up approaching every level, depending on the set of weapons and armor that you get at the start.
You can find and pickup weapons inside some levels too.
There are three different game modes:
Initially, my idea was to create a very simple game that I could finish in a few months just to get my feet wet with the console. Needless to say, I didn’t manage to stick to that commitment and the game grew fairly large compared to my initial plans. Before I could help it I found myself with three different game modes and a custom level editor. I guess that’s just what happens with my hobby projects.
I might write a little post about the editor as well in the future, but for now I just wanted to introduce the actual game. I’ll give more details about this whole project in the next few months, but for now I’m mostly focusing on getting it done. I’m working on this as a side project, so unfortunately time is limited. But I’m getting there!
The game systems are basically all in place and the game is already fully-playable, both story and arcade. I will probably add a few more story levels, but the bulk of the work is done on that front. The main missing things right now are some of the visuals and most of the audio.
I’ve been working on this game in my spare time almost entirely by myself for the past 2 years and a half, but I have recently started recruiting a few people to help me with audio and art. I want this game to be more than just a hobby project and that includes giving it a proper, professionally-made original soundtrack as well as really nice sounds and illustrations. Commissioning other professionals for a project of my making is a first for me and, even though we’re still at the beginning, what they gave me already makes me really excited to see how much better the game will sound with their help!
If I manage to get my game onto the official Catalog, I’m planning to integrate the Playdate Scoreboards system, so you can compete with other players for fun and profit. This will make things much more interesting, especially for Daily runs!
I have no established release date yet, but I am targeting end of 2026 or first half of 2027. More news will come as progress is made. Stay tuned!
]]>Download the new version here.
Happy bombing!
]]>This update fixes a regression introduced in 1.8.0 that can prevent the game to be saved correctly. If you are on version 1.8.0 you are highly recommended to update the game if you want to avoid bad surprises!
Thanks for @orazioedoardo for the fix!
As usual you can grab the update here.
]]>Good news for all Linux players: BOOM: Remake will now get a proper Linux release as an AppImage, rather than the mostly-broken manually-packaged version that was distributed up until now.
The AppImage should be able to run on almost all Linux distributions with little to no effort. You can read more about it on the website linked above, but in a nutshell, you just chmod +x the file and run it.
As an extra bonus, a version for aarch64 is now also available, in addition to x86_64. You can find both in the downloads page.
Huge thanks to @orazioedoardo for making this happen: he literally did all the work for it!
Starting with this release, the Linux version of the game will use different locations for the following files:
assets/;saves/ to XDG_DATA_HOME/lifish, falling back to ~/.local/share/lifish;XDG_CONFIG_HOME/lifish, falling back to ~/.config/lifish.Keep this in mind if you wanna use your previous saves, levels or preferences after upgrading the game’s version!
As always, happy bombing!
]]>Many thanks to malespiaut for the translation work. BOOM: Remake is now available in 4 different languages!
As usual, downloads are available here. Happy bombing!
]]>This version fixes a long-standing bug that made the player able to “dodge” bullet damage in some cases. This was due to an inconsistency between the relative coordinates of the player and the bullet hitbox as calculated by the collision detector and by the player itself, which would sometimes differ by a single pixel. Shouts out for the players who kindly reported this and other bugs in the past few months!
There is still a known issue with the Linux packaged build which doesn’t work for some players, but unfortunately that fix will have to wait until the next patch.
Meanwhile, here are the download links: happy bombing!
]]>Here is the link as usual. Happy bombing!
]]>2024 opens with good news for all BOOM: Remake Mac players: new version 1.7.0 reintroduces (partial) support for OSX! Thanks to the kind contribution by orazioedoardo, BOOM: Remake now works again on the newest OSX versions.
The support is “partial” because I cannot test the OSX version personally, so I can only rely on Mac players’ feedback about it working or not. Nevertheless, if you’re on Mac and missed playing the latest version of the game, go give it a shot and feel free to give your feedback, either on codeberg or github.
Happy new year and, as always, happy bombing :-)
]]>This has a bunch of fixes to bugs that were mostly reported by players (thanks to all of you!) as well as some tweaks to the gameplay to bring it even closer to the original game.
Unfortunately, there is also a sad piece of news: due to me no longer having access to an Apple computer, I won’t be addressing OSX-specific bugs nor create new releases for OSX in the foreseeable future. The OSX version of the game will remain frozen to 1.5.3 for the time being. Apologies to Apple users for that. If you wish to play the latest version, you can always download the source code and compile the game yourself: the process is described in the README.md file. I know it’s not great, but there’s not much else I can do about it right now. Hopefully I’ll eventually be able to resume updating the OSX version as well.
For everyone else, the download links are at the usual place. Happy bombing!
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