Fiendish Bombers is a game that I was working on several years ago, with some help from Duke Serkol. It's a platformer in the vein of Pocket Bomberman, albeit with changes that we both consider to be improvements. The project was dropped in perhaps 2010, but recently, I decided to polish it up and release a demo of the first world, since it had already been built.

You can read more about the game in the helpful README text file with which it is packaged.



Download Fiendish Bombers!

I just played this up to the robo-Ballom boss (and intended to beat it later, but the save file doesn't seem to record any progress beyond stage 2).
Seeing a Bomberman fangame that isn't another hopeful multi-player client is great on its own, but hearing it's an attempt to expand on Pocket Bomberman is pretty great! That game had real potential, I feel, so kudos for giving it another shot.

And the game is quite nicely done! The levels are nice and expansive, the graphics are slick (the enemies are adorable, especially Pass), and the engine works great. The demo only has the core elements down, but you make the most out of them.

My big gripe with the demo, however, is that it all felt rather sluggish. And I think that mostly boils down to the bombs and soft blocks. Bombs seemed to take a long time to detonate, and most of the soft blocks are piled into huge lumps, so it felt like an ordeal blasting through them in hopes of finding an item or an exit. Pocket Bomberman actually spread out its soft blocks a lot, using them only to hide items or block passages, rather than fill up empty parts of the map. They only appeared lumped together in stages with the Penetration Bomb.
Losing all your power-ups after every stage... I can see the potential in that, having to find Bomb Ups before you can cross a large gap, for instance, but it got really tiresome upon facing the Ballom boss.

That being said, I enjoyed what I played, and the demo has some real potential should it be picked up again. I'd love to see more stuff like this!

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Thanks for the feedback! I'm glad that you liked it.  

We felt that Pocket Bomberman was another one of those cases in which Hudson developed a good game concept and then declined to further innovate it, and so many people want to develop Battle Mode clones when the various Normal Modes of the Bomberman franchise have been waiting for change for such a long time.


That's odd. Did you extract the game before playing it? I'm not sure what could have otherwise caused that problem... Hrmmm...


Ah yeah. I recall Duke Serkol having complained about an obsessive urge to blast through all of the filler Soft Blocks. I hadn't considered making the bombs explode more quickly. That might help to alleviate the problem, though there's probably some other additional way of dealing with those extraneous chunks of Soft Blocks. Perhaps more diverse tiles to fill up some of that space instead, like some larger Hard Blocks?


One of the issues is that it would become more of a puzzle game after the first world, and the player would pick which characters to place into the stage before beginning. With regards to your last comment, though:

Yeah, this game just preys on my OCDs like crazy *lol*


The latter seems like a much better solution. If the bombs exploded faster it would be trickier to use them as stepstones. You'd never be able to relax a bit while exploring.

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Metroid: Other M - As in "There's the good Metroid games... we chose to do one of some Other Make altogether."

It is a shame that this game was abandoned, I really liked the game  

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Hey, thanks for trying it out.  

I really enjoyed working on it, and I would like to continue on it, but I just don't have the time to dedicate to something like this anymore. If I ever happen upon a huge pile of money, maybe I'd take the free time to make it happen, hahah.

No, you'll spend time spriting.  

you know? if I had enough time, I could help you finish the game with a friend of mine, you tell me what program I use to make this game?  

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I developed this game in Game Maker 8. I believe that it was version 8. If I were to continue it, I'd prefer to port the code, so to speak, into Java. That way it would be easier to continue the project (in my personal opinion) and also offer cross-platform independence. Well, I guess that new versions of Game Maker can make games that are playable on operating systems other than Windows, but I prefer the flexibility of Java.

Maybe it's silly, and I hope that you don't take offense, but I'd rather let this project rest than to pass it on to anybody else. I guess that I get a little personal about projects that I initiate, as opposed to projects for which people recruit me. I had a lot of things planned out for this game.

Erm... well...

I suppose that I could return to this as a side project, and maybe work on it a little each month, or something. It would take time to complete, but at least it would be finished. I'm currently in the midst of trying to get one of my mobile games working (ran into trouble with the new version of iOS), and I have another project already underway. I'm also supposed to be helping a good friend with his own game, though I'm having difficulties with some cinematic graphics, eheheh. But, there is a lot of code already in the game to work off of, so it's not like starting from scratch, per se...

There are a few things that I'm unsure of, though, and will have to rethink. Sometimes, I still think about this game when I'm walking around or driving or something. I've reconsidered some gameplay mechanics and stuff, like one of the character's special ability and the third world's boss (I thought I'd dropped this project, so I'm repurposing my original concept for an original game of my own), eheh. I'll tell you what, though. If I can get the demo running with Java, and fix up the problems addressed earlier, maybe I'll upload a new copy, and then maybe release a new version every time a world or two is completed, I don't know. The full game would have had, well, at least eight worlds, all of which were basically conceptualized, I will say that much. They would have increased in complexity; later worlds would have required the player to switch between all five characters in a coordinated effort to solve puzzles and clear each stage.

I do still care about this project. I want people to appreciate the true potential of Bomberman. Even the one-off games like Pocket Bomberman could have been so much more if given a little attention. 'Twould seem the mantle rests on the shoulders of the audience now, which is why I'd consider returning to this.

Expect nothing from me, though, because I am full of disappointments, heh.