Explodelon 💣

A minimal Saturn Bomberman clone that is easy to play on RecalBox with friends. Will also work as a way to add new interesting game mechanics.

Development setup

For developing and building, the dependencies Lua, LuaRocks, Make, Zip, Cerulean, and Teal are needed.

So, something like sudo apt install luarocks make zip and then sudo luarocks install tl && luarocks install cerulean or similar for your system should do the trick.

You most likely want to setup so that you have a Teal LSP, see here.

Running the game

First run make package which will produce the game file explodelon.lutro file. Easiest way to run it is to install RetroArch.

You can now run the game directly using ./retroarch --verbose -L cores/lutro_libretro.so path/to/explodelon.lutro (you might need to start it normally first and add the Lutro core first).

Tip: You can create a .env file and add LUTRO_DIST_DIR=... to override where make package will put the game.

Tip: The --verbose flag will give you helpful output if the game crashes during development. This is the main reason to use RetroArch over Ludo.

Recomended core

The game will run using existing compiled and distributed cores. However, some graphis, such as the yellow dino stun cry text, only displays correctly when using a core that supports scaling. To obtain a core with scaling support, it must be built from source. Building from source also allows the core to be compiled with LuaJIT, which gives better performance.

The CI for the fork at https://github.com/efredriksson/libretro-lutro builds from a recent version of lutro and archives the built artifacts. CI builds exists for:

• Windows
• Windows with LuaJIT
• Raspberry Pi 4/5 running Recalbox (build_linux_arm64)

This fork also have added support for more joysticks and allows playing the game with 10 players.

Easiest way to get the .so file into your recalbox installation is to ssh in and remount the volume for write, then you can scp the .so file in (consider renaming existing lutro core as a way to backup).