Here's a typical screenshot from Ba-Bomb!
The basic gameplay of Bombin' & Ba-Bomb! is the same: Click on a bomb to make it explode.
Clicking on a bomb uses up one of your matches, which burn out in 10 seconds if you don't click on anything.
Any bombs of the same color that are touching your selected bomb will also explode.
In addition, the explosions will 'heat up' all other bombs that are touching your exploding bombs.
When a bomb heats up enough, it too will explode, creating a chain reaction that can potentially clear a large section of the play field.
In Bombin', the 'heat level' of a bomb is shown by the number on the bomb. When it's 1 hit away from exploding, you'll see a blinking 4 on the bomb. In Ba-Bomb!, I improved this by making the bombs grow brighter, larger, and more animated as they heated up, and when they are 1 hit away from exploding, they have their fuse lit and are glowing brightly.
The changes I made to the appearance of the bombs in Ba-Bomb! improved the game dramatically without actually changing any of the gameplay.
So, if you reference the screenshot above, here's what'll happes when you click on the green bomb at the top of the screen on the left of the big blue bomb with it's fuse lit:
The 2 connecting green bombs will explode, igniting the big blue bomb and the smaller blue bomb below it. This in turn will cause the big yellow bomb to explode, as well as all connected yellow bombs. That red bomb touching the 2 yellow bombs will get hit twice, causing it to explode as well. A total of 9 bombs in 1 turn.
So, as you play the game, you use up your matches, but you will earn one more match for blowing up 4 bombs in a turn, 2 matches for blowing up 16 bombs, and 3 matches for blowing up 32 or more bombs in a turn.
To spice up the gameplay, there are a few more things than just bombs that show up in the play field.
Every so often, a huge bomb will show up, this big bomb needs to be hit by 8 explosions before it explodes. When the big bomb explodes, it blows up all bombs that surround it, potentially creating a huge chain reaction.
Aside from the big bomb, there is also Squidley, a bomb eating squid monster. Squidley jumps from bomb to bomb sucking out the gunpowder and leaving only a useless dud bomb on the playfield. If you can hit Squidley with 4 explosions, he will explode, blowing up all bombs surrounding him.
When either Squidley or the Big Bomb explode, you will earn an extra punch on a sandwich shop style punch-card. These punch cards will give you extra points or extra matches when you fill them out.
The punch cards were one of my favorite ideas that I came up with when designing the game, not only are they silly/weird (which is always fun), but they give the player incentive to keep playing.
I mentioned that Squidley leaves behind dud bombs, these duds take 2 hits to remove, and don't heat up any bombs when they explode. The duds can quickly pile up if you're not careful, making the game a lot harder until you can remove them.
The last of the objects that show up in Bombin' are the stones. Stones take 3 hits to destroy, and exist only to provide challenge to the game.
The gameplay of Bombin' / Ba-Bomb! is quite good in my opinion (as well as the opinions of virtually everyone who plays it), but in my quest to create a fully original game, I probably alienated a lot of casual players who were expecting 'just another Bejeweled clone'.
That's probably the hardest part of designing a game that's not heavily based on other already popular games; making it simple enough and engaging enough for anyone to become engrossed in the game in just a few seconds. I think that Bombin' / Ba-Bomb! comes really close to this, but never completely makes sense to the player in the first few seconds (it's just a little too analytical of a game). Bombin' is especially guilty of this with it's poor graphics and the initial confusion that players encounter when they first see the numbers on the bombs.
To be continued...
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