Blod-Runner - A GBA mini-game

Blod Runner

starring
Dude


Meet Dude. Dude's job is to pick up the boxes of treasure in each game level. Unfortunately, there are evil dudes blocking his path, and Dude only has a little bit of ammo for his gun!

Dude starts each level with 5 bullets, and occasionally he can find an ammo powerup, which gives him 5 more bullets. Dude starts the game with 3 lives... how far can he get before he is killed for good?

There are two versions of the game, the first with source code for those adventurous enough! All the artowrk is (choke... cough...) programmer art, and I haven't bothered to add even stand-in sounds yet, but I had fun building the game levels (watch your ammo! The later levels force you to use your gun carefully!)

Blodrunner 1.0
Blod-Runner version 1.0, with source code - (81 Kb zip file)

My second GBA mini-game took most of a weekend to complete in the middle of September 2002, with a few extra hours the following Monday night to add in the shell screens and the 5th and 6th game levels.

Years ago, when I first started programming (on a 4.77 Mhz IBM PC clone from Compaq that didn't even have a harddrive), I tried to make my own version of the classic game "Loderunner." I spent weeks of free time, writing in Basic, and in the end I had a little dude walking on blocks I could organize in a text file. That's as far as I got.

I'm now a video game programmer. When I found myself in the mood to build a new GBA mini-game, I decided to revisit that idea from 20 years in my past. Blod-Runner is the result.

The game consists of 13 frames of dude animation (each 8x16 pixels, and all built by hand by me), a tile set of 20 tiles, 3 bullet tiles, and font and icons I grabbed from my previous game, Star Shot. I used tUME, a wonderful DOS based map editor, to build the game levels (each exactly one GBA screen in size), and managed to build 5 game levels so far, though additional levels take very little time to create. I may eventually build a level editor into the game itself, which would allow the player to create his own levels and save them to the battery backup RAM (even uncompressed, I should be able to store 25 or so levels in 32K of backup RAM).

You can play this game on a GBA emulator such as Boycott Advance (see the main GBA development page for links). It will also run on an actual GBA, if you have a flash cartridge to download the ROM image to. You can also download the complete source code for the game.

Blodrunner 2.0
Blod-Runner 2.0 ROM image - (15 Kb zip file)

The latest version of the game includes a 7th game level that is larger than the GBA screen, and a test level with moving platforms (hit SELECT on the main menu to go to a menu for test levels, and then select the "Moving Along" level... you can't stand on a moving platform yet, but they follow the right paths!).

Though you can't see it in the ROM image, I now also have a fairly complete development system... using tUME, I can quickly create game levels of any size, specifing where to find enemies, powerups, and even moving platforms. Anybody interested in a Blodrunner level design contest? :]


You can send me mail at opus@opusgames.com