Boulder Dash Forum

Announcement: Dustin's BD15 - Xpert Remix!
DBD15 is almost finished! For the first time in the series, this game is not 5-level-based. Instead, it contains 16+4 caves from all my GDash games (RockFort 1-3, BD1+2 expert levels, DBD1-14). In these caves, ways were found (mostly by the players at Krissz's site) to get way more diamonds than originally intended by me. Now those diamonds are no longer bonus, but required!
There are four chapters with 4+1 caves each:
Chapter 1 - Grab 'em all: warm-up caves where I didn't require the max diamond amount in the original.
Chapter 2 - A good strategy: caves where success mainly depends on a good plan.
Chapter 3: Tricky tricks: in these caves, tricks were discovered to get more diamonds!
Chapter 4 - Insanity: caves which are too hard for me with the max amount of diamonds, even after I watched the demos on Krissz's site/ Arno's Youtube channel.
I think I'll be done with the game this month - I hope you'll have fun with chapter 1, be challenged by chapters 2-3 and don't throw your PC out of the window while trying chapter 4!

It's released! Have fun with those super-easy caves!

Announcement: Dustin's BD 16!
This will be the first game from me in 2021! After DBD8-Arno Remix and DBD12-Don Pedro Remix, this will be another game where I chose my favourite caves of a famous Boulder Dasher and made a five-level remake game out of them! I'm not sure whether I have already given away who it is, but in case I haven't, here's a clue: it's no coincidence that I chose DBD 16 to be "his" caveset!

The game is finished and will be released very soon!
Here's the solution of the little puzzle - Dustin's BD16 has the subtitle "No1 Remix" because all the caves are taken from the big No1 Boulder series! Similar to DBD8 - Arno Remix and DBD 12 - Don Pedro Remix, I studied the old caves from the BD legend No1 and took the ones I liked best for this remake game. Furthermore, as usual in the series, I made working 5-level versions out of the caves!

I hope you'll enjoy the game and it brings back some memories to those who already played No1's BD games in the '80s!

Ah, and of course it's no coincidence that I waited until DBD16 for this remake project - of course it's a reference to No1's 16BD game

Here are the cave names as a little appertizer:
A- Intro
B- Millipede
C- Demolition Dash
D- Distant Noise
E- Old Patrol
F- Pirate Island
G- Martial Concert
H- Wiggly Lines
I- Robots
J- Consonance
K- Deserted Desert
L- Firefly Painting
M- No One's Combination
N- Adventure Playground
O- Underground Patrol
P- Boulder Clash

It's out! See Game Base for download
I wish everyone lots of joyful hours with the game!

Time to announce Dustin's BD 17 is coming out soon!

After the last two remix games, this one has completely new caves again - as always in classical 5-level style, where level 1 introduces the main idea(s) of each cave and level 5 is the hardcore challenge where almost every mistake is a fail!

It'll still take a few weeks until the release because unfortunately, my old laptop crushed after >10 years and I hadn't made a back-up of the game But the caves are still in my head and the recreation goes very well

As usual, here's an appertizer in form of the cave names:
A - Star Ter
B - Lack of Space
C - Outrageous
D - One of us
Q - Sure-fire Success
E - Firefly Traffic
F - Windows
G - Troubadix
H - Even Eazier
R - Puzzle for in-between
I - Victory
J - Invincible Cocoons
K - Slot Machine (inspired by: Darkstoorm!)
L - Bounty
S - Funny Flies
M - Millionaire
N - Cave Scanning Order 2
O - Puzzle Palace
P - Firefly Circus
T - Dr. Guru's Travellers

Coming out soon!

Oh, the last cave will be named after me? I feel honored!

Yes Brain Delicacy is a fantastic puzzle game, and one cave has especially stayed in my memory. The last intermission will be a smaller and simplified version of it, just emphasizing the beauty of the idea!

It's on the Game Base! Thank you Arno! And a lot of fun for everyone!

Hi guys,
there's an update available to a very old game, namely Dustin's BD 3 (!)
There was a problem with cave H, which was unsolvable if played with the actual GDash version. For this cave, I had used a very specific trick to combine two different random fills (fireflies in empty space + diamonds in dirt) in different regions of the cave, where these regions were different on each difficulty level.. Unfortunately, a bug in the latest GDash version misreads the data, that's why the cave was unsolvable there.
So I've just made a new version of the cave, replacing the random fireflies by regular objects, which now works perfectly fine.

Luckily, I never used the same trick again, so there should be no further problems in other games.

Also, I want to mention that the bug occurs only if
- "random fill" as an object is used AND
- the "replace only this element" feature is used (i.e. the initial setting "no element" is changed).
In short, the "replace only this element" feature does not work. You can make as many different random fills in a cave as you want, you just have to fill a whole rectangle every time (which you want to do in 99.9% of the cases, anyway).

For those who're interested, here's how I used this feature:
- First, I used the random generator to generate random diamonds in dirt.
- I wanted to make a cave with "islands" and "water areas" around those. The islands should be different (in size and location) on each difficulty level.
- This can be done by using the object "maze without dead-ends" if you interprete the "path" as water and "wall" as islands.
- I chose "space" as path and "no element" as wall element for the maze. Now we have islands made of dirt with random diamonds, and the islands are surrounded by empty space (without diamonds).
- Now comes the trickiest part. I want to have randomly placed fireflies around the islands, and only there. As the islands are located differently on each difficulty level, I just chose the object "random fill" over the whole cave, with random fireflies in space.
- But the islands with the diamonds should not be replaced by the new random fill. That's finally the reason why I set "replace only this element: space" for the new random fill.
- Unfortunately, the actual GDash version misreads the "replace only this element" feature and thinks it is still set to "no element", so it fills the whole cave with random fireflies in space, and that's what you see if you open cave H (of the old DBD3 version) with it.
You see how specific the whole idea was and that the buggy "replace only this element" feature is usually not needed anyway!

Summary: A new version of Dustin's BD3 with playable cave H and no other changes is now downloadable from the Game Base!
Thanks again Arno!

Ever tried to beat a magic wall cave without using it? Or get ten extra lives in one cave? Or grab all diamonds in a cave where it looks completely insane? Or tried to do some other crazy stuff which probably nobody has ever tried before...?
If so or if you want to give it a try, then my next release BD3 Challenges is for you! It continues and concludes the BD challenge trilogy with specific challenges for each BD3 cave and int!
Today I beat the last and hardest challenge of the game, so it's as good as finished and will be out soon!

It's downloadable from the Game Base! Have fun!

Dustin's BD 18 is on the way!
This time, it's very classical style where each cave has (more or less big) similarities to the corresponding cave of BD1, 2 or 3. There's also a little story about the development of this game, which you can read in the game story when it's out

Some of the cave names will already tell you which original BD1, 2 or 3 cave it's similar to:
A - Sendy's Intro
B - Matrix
C - Hocus Pocus
D - Butterfly Formations
E - Stopover
F - Mini Firefly Dens
G - Growing Rivals
H - Enchanted Flies
I - Greedy Wizard
J - Labyrinth Tracks
K - Deserted Crowd
L - Ad Banner
M - Exploding Dash
N - Zigzag Tetris
O - Present Perfect
P - Ambitious Spelunking
Ints:
Q: Timed Oldie
R - Symmetric Oldie
S - Mirrored Oldie
T - Puzzling Oldie
Hope this made you curious...

It's on the Game Base! Thanks again Arno!

Dustin's BD 19 - Darkstoorm Remix is abut 90% finished!
Darkstoorm is a player at Krissz's site who is famous for his insane speedruns He likes to play and create classic-style caves and he's uploaded more than 10 classic cavesets à 20 caves so far!
After "DBD8 - Arno Remix", "DBD12 - Don Pedro Remix" and "DBD16 - No1 Remix", I found this the perfect opportunity to make another "Best Of" remake game with all of my favourite Darkstoorm caves!
This time I haven't recreated every cave exactly like the original. Some of the cave ideas highly inspired me, but I had ideas for significant changes. Still, all the caves are made of Darkstoorm's great and fun ideas!
As usual, I made five-level versions out of the caves, where level 1 introduces the main cave ideas and level 5 has very huge diamond requirements which allow very few mistakes!
All caves are created and chosen, but it'll probably still take a few weeks to test everything and find nice names for the caves! That's also the main reason why I can't make a cave name preview just yet