Posting a devLog message here to keep me motivated because it feels like I have 50% of a game already. With the announced release of Season 2 in 2025 I've picked up my Play.Date again and I want to progess my game 'Lone Fury' (working title) - an unabashed Bosconian clone. I'm old enough to remember playing this arcade upright in arcades, so wanted something similar on my Play.Date.
It's coded in Lua on Linux using vscode, a set of purchased assets for sound, and some obvious Bosconian inspired graphics. These dev forums have also been a great help.
Here's what it looks like so far (you don't usually start with eight enemy bases, this is a stress test level):
A more interesting feature (I think) is the formation flying squadrons that appear if you dally too long destroying bases. They can fly in several different formations and chase the player using simple chase 'AI'.
Next I plan to add:
High score table + input + putting it in attract cycle. Well supported by the Play.Date SDK fortunately.
Mines! Which featured in classic Bosconian.
Level generation: There's a whole level definition system, and a level manager in place that ramps up the difficulty and scale of the levels. Levels are pre-defined at the moment, but I'd like to make the level manager responsible for placing bases and obstacles in a pseudo-random fashion so each level is unique but of similar difficulty.
More sounds! I have plenty of assets for this, just need to find suitable opening/launching/death music in there.
A few months later post Xmas and New Year and I've published what I have on Itch.Io here:
It's build against the latest 2.6.2 PlayDate.SDK and runs fine on my actual hardware, sticking to a solid 30 FPS. There may be bugs, but no crash bugs that I'm aware of. Download it and give it a try, any feedback welcomed.
It's a hobbyist project I keep plugging away at in my spare time. The Play.Date Lua SDK is really a joy to work with.
The latest changes to the game are the addition of a permanent high score table, and randomly generated levels...so it's theoretically an open ended game. The level difficulty will ramp up too.
Plays great, though the use of free movement definitely threw off my typical Bosconian strategy. Took me a few tries to break myself of the cardinal direction movement limitation of the original. Neat stuff.
Thanks! Yes it's something of a small update to the original game because I wanted a more fluid experience and the crank works quite well to control the ship I think.
The Play.Date is a powerful little console for what it is and I wanted to play something Bosconian-like myself, so enjoy!
I'm just about to update the itch.io page with a bunch of fixes. How bugs get into a game a simple as this is a mystery...
A long weekend here in New Zealand, so I spent it coding. Lone Fury v0.5 is released over on Itch.IO with enemy base shields and an enemy base zap weapon which brings Lone Fury pretty much in-line with the Bosconian game it's cloning.
I feel like the game needs a little bit more love and I'm calling it done. Primarily want to mix the random base generation with pre-generated levels so I can make a 'base hell' appear level later on in the game. Also still need to tweak the simple enemy AI a bit, to handle enemy overlap better.
Do people open source their projects? Do Panic accept contributions that are based on classic arcade titles? I'm assuming no because of the legal ramifications. Ah well it was a fun learning exercise.
I make no guarantees about the quality of said code . For example I should get of angle and just move to radians. There's still at least one thing I want to do with the codebase which is add back the 'predefined' base layout code I've removed - so I can have later levels with amusing non random base layouts (like the original Bosconian).
. For example I should get of angle and just move to radians. There's still at least one thing I want to do with the codebase which is add back the 'predefined' base layout code I've removed - so I can have later levels with amusing non random base layouts (like the original Bosconian).