Boulders - A Boulder Dash Clone

This is a basic clone of the Boulder Dash game, originally built by Peter Liepa. The game mechanics are roughly implemented from what I've had in memory. It is a demo/research project for a couple of web platform technologies, frameworks and methodologies I'm interested in and love to work with.

Technologies

• Eleventy
• TypeScript
• Web Components
• esbuild
• lightningcss
• Web Audio API. A microlibrary dropped out of this: https://retro-sound.js.org
• JSX without React: I've written a bit about that Custom JSX in TypeScript
• Different Rendering Engines and changing them on-the-fly while in-game: WebGL, WebGPU, Canvas2D
• GLSL and WGSL shaders
• Building game mechanics incrementally via test-driven development
• some basic Software Architecture principles, some SOLID but mostly "loose coupling" and depending on interfaces rather than implementations
• "isomorphic TypeScript": The Canvas2D renderer used in the Frontend is re-used in Eleventy/node.js to generate preview images.
• ASCII art maps: the levels are plain text files with ASCII art maps, processed by Eleventy

Talk

I held a talk about the project at the NovaSummit 2023.

There are also slides. The Slides are also made with Eleventy. The source is available on GitHub.

Development environment setup

This project relies on the canvas npm package to render preview images for the levels via Eleventy.

It requires a bunch of dependencies to be installed on the system. Please follow the instructions on the npm page.

License

• Code: LICENSE
• Artwork: CC-BY-SA 4.0