About

Sometime in the early 90s a game existed on the Macintosh called Diamonds which was something like a cross between a puzzle and action game. The game play required for the player to use the ball on the screen to hit bricks and destroy them. However, rather than hitting the ball with a paddle like breakout, the player controlled the left and right of the ball with the arrow keys. The ball still bounces up and down on its own, but there is no bottom to fall off of.

To make the game more interesting some of the bricks were different colors so that only when the ball was the same color could the brick be removed. There was also a key and lock brick set where you first had to get the key to remove the lock brick. Other bricks existed with other functions but the basic goal remained, remove the bricks to pass the level.

The resulting game was fun, challenging, and suitable for all ages. Rebound is a reimplementation of the Diamonds game in C++ for Linux.

Progress

I believe the game is nearly done! I would consider release 0.9.14 to be a late beta and ready for download and play. This release comes with fourteen levels which I think are fun to play and challenging. Anyone can add new levels by editing the data/level.ldf file. A readme exists in the same directory which describes the format of the level file.

The following are a list of items which I feel are still remaining before I release a 1.0 version.

• Levels - I still need more levels, at least 15.


• Installer - I need to enable the tool to be installed rather than just assume the current directory. This also means adding a --prefix and --libs, --includes options for easy configuration. I think SCONS has support for these.


• Subversion - I want to put the source into subversion. I've worked with cvsnt before but not subversion so this is going to require a little research on my part.

The following items are things I would like to eventually fix/work on for a 1.5 version.

• Artwork - My artwork is just so so. I'm still in the process of learning Inkscape which is why some of the images have a bit of a campy feeling. Better artwork is needed.


• Score Area - Eventually I would like the countdown timer to be graphical (a set of vertical bars) like the original game was. I would also like that once a user cleared the screen they could watch as the points were "moved" from the timer to the score ... again, like the original game did.


• Comments in Level Parser - Currently you can't have any comments in the ldf file. I need to update the parser to allow for comments which I believe means messing with the lexer.


• Level Parser Error Messages - Currently the level parser does not tolerate errors in the level data very well at all. At some point I need to dig into boost spirit again to figure out how to add nicer error messages.


• Even more levels - It would seem reasonable to have somewhere on the order of 25 or more levels.

The following are items I dream about adding for 2.0 version which may or may not ever come to light.

• High Score listing - You know, like real games often have where you can enter your initials and see the highest scores with the highest levels achieved.


• Selecting a level file - The level.ldf file has a tag at the top for title which is, so far, never used. My goal for this was to have multiple level.ldf files (intro.ldf, basic.ldf, advanced.ldf) and give the user a selectable list of "games" to play when the application started. This way an advanced user would not need to play all the intro levels to get up to the more challenging ones. And vice-versa kids would not get frustrated trying to pass some of the more advanced levels.
• 
  

I could use the most help in writing new levels and the artwork. For now I want to maintain control over the code so I don't need any programming assistance yet. If you are interested in writing additional levels they are really easy to do by simply editing the levels.ldf file in the data directory.

So far the game has been written entirely by myself, Joshua Gerth, but I am hoping to get some assistance in the levels and artwork. Of course, my work on this game pales in comparison to the amazing amount of work put in by the people who wrote the SDL and boost libraries on which this game depends.

My primary goal from this game are to learn SDL, boost signals and boost spirit technologies. A secondary goal is for me to have something I wrote available to others, rather than being blocked behind IP obligations of my job. A tertiary goal is to have a game which is fun and playable by my daughter.

Version 0.9.14