Rebound

Just discovered that Rebound was not compiled correctly. If you are
having problems, please download this updated version. It should be
more stable. Sorry for any inconvenience. -cavemann

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About 

Sometime in the early 90s a game existed on the Macintosh called Diamonds
which was something like a cross between a puzzle and action game. The
game play required for the player to use the ball on the screen to hit
bricks and destroy them. However, rather than hitting the ball with a
paddle like breakout, the player controlled the left and right of the
ball with the arrow keys. The ball still bounces up and down on its own,
but there is no bottom to fall off of. 

To make the game more interesting some of the bricks were different colors
so that only when the ball was the same color could the brick be removed.
There was also a key and lock brick set where you first had to get the key
to remove the lock brick. Other bricks existed with other functions but
the basic goal remained, remove the bricks to pass the level. 

The resulting game was fun, challenging, and suitable for all ages.
Rebound is a reimplementation of the Diamonds game in C++ for Linux. 

Progress 

I believe the game is nearly done! I would consider release 0.9.5 to be a
late beta and ready for download and play. This release comes with eight
level which I think are fun to play and challenging. Anyone can add new
levels by editing the data/level.ldf file. A readme exists in the same
directory which describes the format of the level file. 

The following are a list of items which I feel are still remaining before
I release a 1.0 version. 

Size Change - DONE - The new size should work nicely on a monitor with at
at least a 1024x768 resolution. This also helped me flush all hard coded
values to the rebound.hpp file which will eventually be turned into a
config file so the game can support different sizes. 

Game Over - DONE - When your game is over you are now given a nice game
over image with options as to what to do next. 

Levels - I still need more levels, at least 15. 

Installer - I need to enable the tool to be installed rather than just
assume the current directory. This also means adding a --prefix and
--libs, --includes options for easy configuration. I think SCONS has
support for these. 

Subversion - I want to put the source into subversion. I've worked with
cvsnt before but not subversion so this is going to require a little
research on my part. 

The following items are things I would like to eventually fix/work on for
a 1.5 version. 

Artwork - My artwork is just so so. I'm still in the process of learning
Inkscape which is why some of the images have a bit of a campy feeling.
Better artwork is needed. 

Score Area - Eventually I would like the countdown timer to be graphical
(a set of vertical bars) like the original game was. I would also like
that once a user cleared the screen they could watch as the points were
"moved" from the timer to the score ... again, like the original game did.

Comments in Level Parser - Currently you can't have any comments in the
ldf file. I need to update the parser to allow for comments which I
believe means messing with the lexer. 

Level Parser Error Messages - Currently the level parser does not tolerate
errors in the level data very well at all. At some point I need to dig into
boost spirit again to figure out how to add nicer error messages. 

Even more levels - It would seem reasonable to have somewhere on the order
of 25 or more levels. 

The following are items I dream about adding for 2.0 version which may or
may not ever come to light. 

High Score listing - You know, like real games often have where you can
enter your initials and see the highest scores with the highest levels
achieved. 

Selecting a level file - The level.ldf file has a tag at the top for
title which is, so far, never used. My goal for this was to have multiple
level.ldf files (intro.ldf, basic.ldf, advanced.ldf) and give the user a
selectable list of "games" to play when the application started. This way
an advanced user would not need to play all the intro levels to get up to
the more challenging ones. And vice-versa kids would not get frustrated
trying to pass some of the more advanced levels. 

Help 

I could use the most help in writing new levels and the artwork. For now
I want to maintain control over the code so I don't need any programming
assistance yet. If you are interested in writing additional levels they
are really easy to do by simply editing the levels.ldf file in the data
directory. 

Author 

So far the game has been written entirely by myself, Joshua Gerth, but
I am hoping to get some assistance in the levels and artwork. Of course,
my work on this game pales in comparison to the amazing amount of work
put in by the people who wrote the SDL and boost libraries on which this
game depends. 

My primary goal from this game are to learn SDL, boost signals and boost
spirit technologies. A secondary goal is for me to have something I wrote
available to others, rather than being blocked behind IP obligations of
my job. A tertiary goal is to have a game which is fun and playable by
my daughter. 

Good Luck,
   Joshua Gerth