Boxxle in Swift – Game Boy Port | Hacker News Reader

Boxxle in Swift – Game Boy Port

github.com

41 pointsKennyCason9 comments

By the way, this is originally a japanese game called Sokoban. Boxxle was a clone of Sokoban.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokoban

I wrote a space-themed iOS derivative of Sokoban many years ago, which I sadly never put up on the app store. I wanted to build more levels, free-to-play mechanics, and got sidetracked and never finished the project. This is what an early build looked like, before I built in a better input mechanism:

https://vimeo.com/3918704

I ended up finding it cumbersome for each move to require a tap, so I built a mechanism whereby you could draw your movements on screen and queue them up.

http://cl.ly/image/0c222O3I020Q (a whole bunch of stuff is broken in this dev screenshot).

Nice!

I wrote a rather simplistic clone (no sound!) just to learn some Z80 assembly and GameBoy hardware low-level programming, back in 1997 (http://www.student.nada.kth.se/~d94-ebr/rel_sw/gb/sokoban/do...).

It's the first (and only!) program I've written for the GameBoy, so don't expect too much.

Awesome! Is there a link to the source? I couldn't seem to find it, but I'm actually a huge fan of Z80 ASM as it was one of the first assembly languages that I tinkered with. I'd love to revisit sometime as a fun side project.

Nice! I know how you feel about getting side tracked and not finishing a hobby project. Looks like you got very far, I'd recommend going a head an pushing through it.

"so I built a mechanism whereby you could draw your movements on screen and queue them up." - I actually feel the same way when I play other Sokoban games, that's an interesting idea. :)

Just to be pedantic - this isn't a port as the original source wasn't used, this is a remake.

Haha Thanks! Every time I typed "port" I couldn't help but think "I don't think this is a port" but didn't know quite what to call it. :)

Another nitpick: It wasn't Nintendo who created Boxxle. The game was developed by Thinking Rabbit and published by FCI.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boxxle

Great job!

A few suggestions:

1) You may have better results with your pixel art if you change the filteringMode of your SKTextures to SKTextureFilteringMode.NearestNeighbor instead of .Linear.

2) You might want to store SKTextures in your imageDict instead of full SKSpriteNodes. It seems you aren't reusing those nodes, just the textures.

3) Maybe use a plist file to store the level data instead of hard-coded array constants? It's a little more flexible once you abstract the data outside of your source code.

Thanks a lot, It was certainly a battle of figuring out Swift while making continual forward progress. Thanks for the suggestions. I didn't even know about the filtering mode! I also agree on only storing the SKTextures. In regards to the level data. I hated storing hard coded arrays but couldn't figure anything else out in time :) I would 1000x prefer to use a plist file to store the data. That way I could also more easily parse the common level formats. For example: http://www.ne.jp/asahi/ai/yoshio/sokoban/handmade/soko001.tx...

Thanks for taking time to read through the code!

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