Regular "patterns" in early BD games

[Arno]

Probably I'm not the only one who noticed this, but many of the classic games seem to have some regularities in the cave design. Here I mainly refer to BD1, 3, ..., 11 (BD2 being a real exception!)!

Although there are exceptions, I discovered the following patterns:

- Cave A is often a very simple cave with random boulders, diamonds and some walls. The same for cave C (somewhat harder).
- Cave D often introduces the butterflies (mostly to be killed by boulders, sometimes by amoeba).
- Cave E/F form a pair of caves with a similar theme (avoiding fireflies guarding the diamonds).
- Cave G contains an amoeba often (either to surround by boulders, or to blast with fireflies).
- Cave H contains a magic wall often. Same for P.
- Cave I is often about moving through a tight boulder/diamond mixture (with little dirt or no dirt at all).
- Cave M is often a butterfly explosion cave, N being a follow up with butterflies too (sometimes combined with amoeba, sometimes without).

When I design my games, I sometimes tend to make caves according to these patterns also!

Are there other games following these traditions?

[Sendy]

Hmm, well spotted. I picked up on a few of those. I'll have to use it as a template for my next project, since it will essentially have 20 distinct levels with 2 difficulty levels.

[John]

- Cave A is often a very simple cave with random boulders, diamonds and some walls. The same for cave C (somewhat harder).

The C caves don't contain any empty "space" from start (2 and 11 are exceptions), so it's always dead quiet when you start a C cave. They're usually yellow, too.

[Arno]

Indeed!

Typically cave E, F, I, J and P are also quiet at the start.

Exceptions being 3E, 3F, 9I, 10J, 11P.

[RTADash]

I've never followed a design pattern. Actually I've designed all my caves in any order depending on when the ideas came to me. Then, when I finished designing, I put the caves in some random order that psychologically satisfied me.
[EDIT] But it is quite funny how they never got tired of themes/elements appearing in the same order.

[LogicDeLuxe]

There were two things, modders didn't completely understood in the early days:
- The animation table
- The cave pointer table

Without touching those, you restrict youself. Leaving the animation table alone, you only want to use animated objects which were used in the same map in BD1, unless you wouldn't care for their animation, which was occasionally done as well (including BD3).

Leaving the cave pointer untouched, you obviously couldn't build caves complexer than the original BD1 counterparts (including BD3, again).

For example Cave A often has these two wall lines often merely changed direction or became rectangles. If you look for it, you'll notice, that many games didn't even bother changing the random seed, thus having the boulders and diamonds in the same place BD1 has.

Surprisingly unmentioned here, Cave C is often merely random placed elements with in and out boxes added, since that's all BD1 has here.

Also funny that you apparently didn't notice, that several of those early games didn't even modify the intermissions, thus beeing identical to either BD1 or BD3. Interestingly enough, Dr. Watson did modify the intermissions in his BD4.

No One was the first to shift around the caves in memory, so he could actually use the full 255 possible bytes per cave, which is still slightly restricted, ie. you couldn't fill a complete cave with a maze, though you could be a lot more complex than BD1 caves at least.
The format was redesigned in PLCK which allowed unrestricted placements, but sacrificed the 5 level feature at the same time. Probably because the level idea would appear rather dull without the possibility of random placed elements.

I've never followed a design pattern. Actually I've designed all my caves in any order depending on when the ideas came to me. Then, when I finished designing, I put the caves in some random order that psychologically satisfied me.

Sure, that makes sense, but we're talking about the early games, which would be roughly those which appeared before the PLCK and were made with just a hex editor. Nobody had the idea (or knowledge) of changing the cave pointers and shift the caves in memory back then. It was all reverse engineering and a steady learning curve. It actually would be easily possible in the BD1 engine to change the cave order by just exchanging their pointers.

[RTADash]

Sure, that makes sense, but we're talking about the early games, which would be roughly those which appeared before the PLCK and were made with just a hex editor.

I know; I'm just cor-relating to the topic in my own way

[Arno]

Nobody had the idea (or knowledge) of changing the cave pointers and shift the caves in memory back then. It was all reverse engineering and a steady learning curve. It actually would be easily possible in the BD1 engine to change the cave order by just exchanging their pointers.

Very interesting information! Now I guess for a similar reason, the colors in Don Pedro's BD5 and 6 are exactly those of BD1.
(One exception, however, is cave BD5 cave I. It has the same colors as cave H.... coincidence?)

Also, can it be that at the time of BD7, Don Pedro knew how to modify 2 colors, but not the 3rd color? (Why? In BD7 the wall color is green in G and M and white in all other caves, just like BD1.)

BTW, I found 2 games that (probably for the same reason?) have the same colors as BD3, the Sijben Soft version: Brutalo BD and Masters Boulder Dash (except for some caves, again).

[LogicDeLuxe]

My best guess is, that Don Pedro is one of those who just doesn't care about colors. It's really not hard to guess how to modify them. Once you found the caves in memory, it is very tempting to just change all the parameters, which are conveniently all stored just before the drawing instructions, and see what they do. At least, this is more fun than reading through disassemblies.

I also saw PLCK games which have the default colors (brown, orange, cyan) remained in all caves, which looks rather dull. For those, No One implemented and encouraged the use of the recolor feature in his Levelpacker.
In CLCK, I though of a more foolproof way to ensure none monotonous colors. It picks random colors whenever it starts an empty cave. This is restricted to black background and border, a bright color for walls, no black in forground colors and always 3 different forground colors.

[LogicDeLuxe]

I just noticed something strange.
Don Pedro apparently modded the BD1 version with the First Star-logo. It isn't too surprising that almost all the colors are the same as in BD1 in his BD5 and BD6.
And now comes the strange part, BD7 has almost all the same colors as BD3! This is in deed strange, since BD3 is based on a different version of BD1 (without the First Star-logo) than that he used.

The only explanation I can think of is, that he saved the BD3 caves to disk, loaded them in his version of BD1 and modified them there. But why would someone do this when nothing is gained through that?

And since BD8, he started to change colors in most caves, apparently. A few still have BD3 colors, but most don't.

[Arno]

And now comes the strange part, BD7 has almost all the same colors as BD3! This is in deed strange, since BD3 is based on a different version of BD1 (without the First Star-logo) than that he used.

It's even more funny: Out of the 3 foreground colors, 2 of them are the same as in BD3, but the wall/amoeba color is the same as BD1.
Indeed, in cave C and K this color is white instead of yellow, and in cave G and M it's green instead of white.
Furthermore, the intermissions are all as in BD1. Very strange......

[LogicDeLuxe]

It's even more funny: Out of the 3 foreground colors, 2 of them are the same as in BD3, but the wall/amoeba color is the same as BD1.

This seems to be too strange to be a technical reason or a coincidence either. Now, as I think of this, maybe it was meant to be just some strange joke and no one got it?

[Arno]

This seems to be too strange to be a technical reason or a coincidence either.

Same thoughts here. It looks like DP just took the BD1 engine (as usual), included the BD3 colors for a reason, but didn't care for the 3rd color, and the intermission colors either.

There could be reasons for using colors of existing games. I've used a lot of BD1 and BD3 colors in Arno Dash 1.