Classic platformer

Super Bombinhas

Despite the humongous processing and graphics advances made in the last 35 years, and the fact that the genre is still popular, the humble platform game still has the same basic mechanics as 1983's Manic Miner. You move left and right and jump to negotiate a path across one platform to another while avoiding enemies and pitfalls. Whether it's playing Moss in virtual reality, or New Super Mario Bros. U Deluxe on the Nintendo Switch, the vast majority of platform games use this same premise. Which is why it's a totally legitimate endeavor for Super Bombinhas to unashamedly pursue that old addictive gameplay style in the 21st century. Pursue is the operative word here, because the game is far from complete. There are currently six playable stages, complete with artwork, sound, and music. You can play these stages properly, collecting coins and navigating across the retro colorful 2D terrain much like you would on an 8-bit console.

The game obviously takes a lot of inspiration from early Mario games and starts off with an island map for you to track your progress as you move from one level to another. A larger map implies more islands will open as the game evolves, but much of the hard work has already been done, and the moving mechanics themselves feel complete. This is often difficult to get right, but the developer has captured the addictive feel and control of these earlier games, along with the aesthetics and level design. The game itself is written in Ruby with some help from the Gosu and MiniGL libraries. The source code looks extremely well-organized, with a clear distinction between the logic and level design, for instance. This should make it an ideal project to contribute to, even if it's just asking for access to the level editor to help populate some of those later islands.

Project Website

https://github.com/victords/super-bombinhas

If you've ever wanted to learn Ruby without building a web framework, Super Bombinhas is the perfect project.