Rebound 0.9.14 review

Sometime in the early 90s a game existed on the Macintosh called Diamonds which was something like a cross between a puzzle and actio

License: GPL (GNU General Public License) File size: 0K Developer: Joshua Gerth

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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.

The game has actually come quite far and I am finally ready to call the 0.8 release beta. An early beta, but it appears to be quite stable and quite playable. I've even got 4 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 file.
Score Area - Only thing that is missing is the countdown timer.

Background - Only one background image is currently supported. It would be nice to have one for each level.

Sound - Background music and some collision sounds.

Entry Screen - DONE

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. I think this means more 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.

Artwork - Pretty much a complete overhaul of the artwork. Can be done external to the game development.

Levels - I need more levels, at least 15 or 20.

What's New in This Release:
14 playable levels, thanks to submitted levels by Tobin Zerba and Quentin Crain!
New backgrounds have been added which are images from NASA of outerspace. If you feel these are too dark and distract from the game play, please let me know and I can work on modifying them.
Version 1.0 will have an rpm release for Linux and perhaps a better installer for Windows.