Recreating the classic Bomberman

When we said "go out with a bang", Andrew Smith took it to heart and decided to blow more than just the blinking doors off!

- Andrew Smith

OUR EXPERT Andrew Smith works as a developer for NHS Digital when he's not updating ancient gaming code.

QUICK TIP Grab the code for this tutorial with: git clone https:// github.com/ asmith1979/ 1xf299 bomberman/

Bomberman, developed by Hudson Soft in 1983 and currently owned by Kanomi, is a game in which a player has to eliminate every other player on the game grid to win. We're looking at a clone of Bomberman created by Michal Sliva and Tomas Novak, the source code of which has been adapted for the benefit of this tutorial. The original source code for the project can be retrieved from https://github.com/Forestf90/Bomberman.

On a clean dev system, we need to install and set up Python 3.10. If you already have Python and PyGame installed, Python 3.8+ should be a good enough version to use with this tutorial. Type the following to install Python 3.10 and PyGame:

$ sudo apt-get update

$ sudo apt-get install python3.10

$ sudo apt-get install python3-pip 

$ python3.10 -m pip install pygame

To make sure you are calling the correct Pip version, check in the Scripts folder of the Python installation folder. There may be a version number of Pip to use Pip 3.8, for example.

Check the Python version and PyGame version, then Git clone from the repository:

$ git clone https://github.com/asmith1979/lxf299_ bomberman/

The source code and project can also be retrieved from the Linux Format archive. This tutorial focuses on the source code located in the folder called Ixf299_ bomberman, so if not already in that folder, type $ cd lxf299_bomberman to get into the folder and gain access to the Python source code.

Game project