BombSquad

BombSquad Modding Guide Episode 6: Meteor Shower

43 Comments

Ok; enough with the expositional stuff already… today we’re going to make an actual, playable, (hopefully) enjoyable mini-game.

It’s called ‘Meteor Shower’, and it’s pretty simple. You run around a platform as bombs fall from the sky at an ever increasing rate. The last team/player alive wins.

Here’s a video of me testing it:

To play, simply download the following file and stick it in BombSquad’s user-scripts dir.  Poke the “Settings”->”Advanced”->”Show-Mods-Folder” button if you forgot where that is. You can then launch BombSquad, create a new teams or free-for-all playlist, and you should be able to add a ‘Meteor Shower’ game to it.

http://www.files.froemling.net/bombsquad/mods/api-003(1.4.7)/bsMeteorShowerMod.py

..And that’s it… To see what’s going on, just open the file and take a look at the code. I’ve commented it so you should be able to follow along. If you’re brave, take a stab at modifying it; see if you can change where or when the bombs fall, or change it to use a different map. Good luck!

43 thoughts on “BombSquad Modding Guide Episode 6: Meteor Shower”

  1. Hey Eric,

    Just a quicky about modding a game mode… I’m starting out with something really simple, like changing the bomb types that fall in Meteor Shower… I see that the regular bomb is called by bsBomb.Bomb… was wondering what the calls are for the other bomb types?
    Thanks!

    Reply

    1. Hi Jonathan,
      All the bombs are actually bsBomb.Bomb().. there’s just a ‘bombType’ arg you can pass to Bomb() to get the different varieties… it can be ‘ice’,’impact’,’landMine’,’normal’,’sticky’, or ‘tnt’.

      Note that with land-mines there’s one extra step you have to do of arming the mine after you create it (this normally happens when your character throws it).

      ..so as an example, to create a land-mine and arm it 1 second later you’d do:
      myMine = bsBomb.Bomb(bombType=’landMine’)
      bs.gameTimer(1000,bs.WeakCall(myMine.handleMessage,bsBomb.ArmMessage()))

      Hope that helps!
      -eric

      Reply

  2. Thanks for posting these modding tutorials. It’s awesome, love the fact that I can take a already great game and think up a mini game for it.

    If say I really liked a mini game I made or someone made a really awesome mini game and sent it to you would you consider putting it in the actual game?

    Reply

  3. Do you have a place (even a repo) for people to submit and download mini-games? Would make sharing them much easier.

    Mind you I’ve only achieved very minor tweaks so far.

    Reply

    1. I don’t have a repo or anything for this yet but I’d love to make one if people start doing some fun mods.. I’ll make myself a note..

      Reply

  4. This is great and would love to see some more examples or other peoples work! I’ve tinkered with it a bit my self with mixed results.

    Reply

      1. Glad to hear it! I need to take a pass through and update a few things that have changed in 1.3.22, so don’t hesitate to post here or email me at support@froemling.net if you have any questions or something doesn’t seem to be working. There’s not a whole lot of examples out there just yet since this stuff is all pretty new, but I’m hoping that will start to change soon 🙂

        Reply

  5. I’ve downloaded the files and tried putting it in the mod directory but with no luck. The gametype is able to be picked and played but is simply the rampage map without any bombs falling, title and description, or anything else.

    The disabled pickup, bombs, and punching is inputted into it though, so I cannot do any of that. I’ve tried moving the files around as well within the Sys directory and 1.3.22 directory, but still no luck. On a Mac, do you know whatsup?

    Reply

    1. If you hit ~ you should see some errors being printed.. the mod actually needed to be updated since I changed some things in 1.3.22. If you download it again it should work now.. please let me know if not.

      Reply

  6. My OUYA is connected to my PC via micro USB and it won’t let me edit the about this folder file, or let me put anything in the folder on MTP. On PTP, it jst shows how much storage I have on my USB and when I click it, it says nothing is on the USB.

    Reply

  7. Hi Eric,
    I’d like to know more about the coordinate system for the maps to adjust the bomb spawn points for other maps. Thanks
    T

    Reply

    1. Currently spawn points and other positions are contained in a little python module for each map. If you look at bsMap.py in the system scripts you’ll see them.. i.e.; for the HockeyStadium map it imports hockeyStadiumDefs.py which has a bunch of positions in it (‘flag1′,’flag2′,’powerupSpawn’,etc). I’m hoping to come up with an easier way to customize maps at some point but for now you can edit those or whatnot..

      Reply

    1. I’ve made a lot of changes in the 1.3.24 update, so the old meteor-shower example breaks if you try to run it there. I just uploaded a new version that works in 1.3.24, so give it another try if you’d like.
      I’m currently reorganizing/simplyfing/documenting the whole Python API; the dust should hopefully start to settle by version 1.3.26 or so…

      Reply

  9. Hello Eric,
    Bomb Squad is a wonderful game, and right now it is just available on OUYA console. As a Chinese player, I cannot get OUYA, do you have a plan to make it available on some game consoles in China ?

    Reply

    1. I’m hoping to look into the Chinese market at some point, but right now I’m pretty busy trying to finish up modding/net-play/etc..

      Reply

      1. Hi Eric, tks for your reply. Happy to know u’re busy with upgrading the game , and display a better version to us. Hope the Chinese players can play it on mobile phone and game console in future. We really love it very much and I play in on OUYA in my office, I really hope you can port it on our Android game console, we can pay some minimum guarantee to make it. If you really don’t have time, can you share the source code with us based on some payment ?

        Reply

  10. My friends and I are really enjoying playing BS! We would love to translate BS into Chinese! Though very few people use Mac in China. But it’ll be popular someday for sure.
    And if there’s a place stores all mods fans made. That would be great.

    Reply

    1. Glad you like the game! I’m going to be bringing it to more platforms soon so it should be more available in China. If you’d like to help translate, here’s my translation website: http://bombsquadgame.com/translate I’m hoping to have a build soon that can display Chinese characters.

      Reply

  11. How do I download the file? It says “URL Not Found, 404”. I found the file later, but when I click on it, it opens the script, but it doesn’t download the file. Can you send me a direct link to the file, please?

    Reply

    1. The link should be fixed now; thanks for the heads-up… (also, please make sure you’re running BombSquad 1.3.28 or later)

      Reply

      1. I don’t understand, because when I click on the link, it doesn’t download the file, it just opens the file script. Maybe I’m just being dumb… How can I convert the script to a Py file?

        Reply

        1. Never mind. But is it unavailable on the Windows Public Beta/Early Pre-build version? I’ve created a Py file with the script, extracted it to the mods folder, but when I open the game, no Meteor Shower game mode shows up in Team Mode or in Free-For-All Mode.

          Reply

          1. You have to create a new game list and add a game to that list to see it; it won’t just show up next to the current ‘Default Game List’ or whatnot.. is that what you’re trying? Also for future reference you should just be able to right click on the link and go to ‘download this file’ or whatnot. Hope this helps!

      2. Hey Erick.

        I’m running version 1.3.29 and for some reason meteor shower is not working on this version. I had no problem running it on 1.3.28. Is there something I’m doing wrong? or do you need to update the script for it to work?

        Reply

  13. Just curious if more modding information will be published such as will there be a way for users to make their own custom maps or perhaps even their own models?

    Thanks for the wonderful game.

    – S

    Reply

      1. Hello!

        A bit of time has gone by and I would like to ask about how custom models work in Bombsquad. I know you are a super busy person with all of the updates and you are even releasing more models and maps. I just wanted to let you know that I am still interested in such customization features.

        Thanks again for the wonderful game.

        – S

        Reply

      1. Hi, great game overall. My only issue is that I cannot play the meter shower mini game because I get an error about “Can’t load game bs meteor shower -2…..it targets api version none: we require 2”. I tried downloading the current and latest script file inside of: Index of /bombsquad/mods/api-002(1.3.28) but it still doesn’t work. I would appreciate your help with this for my son thank you. By the way I am running 1.3.29 for Mac on OSX 10.9.4

        Reply

    1. The game should create a ‘BombSquad’ dir on your sdcard or whatnot and you can drop mod scripts in there. See the ‘modding’ section here for details.. You can also telnet in to the game to issue commands to it.

      Reply

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