Daily Archives: February 27, 2018

Earthshaker recreation – Retro game remake

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I started working on a computer science assignment then got distracted, I ended up starting to write a remake of the old classic Earthshaker which was on the ZX Spectrum. I’m not sure if this game was released outside of Europe so it way not be too well known.

I used a copy of the sprites from the original game as well as some sounds. I captured as much as I could via an emulator.

The levels are loaded from ASCII files and I created the first level from the game and it appears to work somewhat as the original. The gravity and the player movements aren’t quite right yet but the basic rules of the game physics are working as intended.

The level is called “Room for improvement” and as you can see, the interface definitely has room for improvement.

I wrote it all in Java, I used a tutorial from MrJavaHelp on YouTube to start me off with the basic drawing image to a window and getting keyboard input routines then I expanded it from there. His video is here if you’re interested.

I will eventually make the code open source and upload it on this page, but I’m using a library from my university that I don’t know if I can distribute, I plan to replace that library with some of my own routines eventually (it’s just ASCII file loading methods I’m using from it). I’m also worried about copyright issues with the graphics and sound as they are from the original game, I don’t intend to sell it and the original game was distributed for free with a magazine back in the day. It loads the levels, graphics and sound resources from external files so they can be changed at the will of the user.

More details (and hopefully a download link) will be coming soon…