Bomberman Blowout
Do you plan to defeat them? Then, I'll let you in on a secret.
Summary
Bomberman Blowout is a collection of projects that focus on the Bomberman franchise ranging from interface design showcases to fully-developed proof-of-concept game demos. The library is primarily made up of content from 16SBMHD with two other projects joining it in tandem known as “Bomberman Story Online” and “Bomberman Network Series Championship” or “BNSC” for short. The goal of the latter two was to re-imagine an older Bomberman title as an MMO adventure game with a robust online competitive community and showcase that the Bomberman franchise would lend itself well to being an entertaining eSport. All of the components of this project can be viewed through the Bomberman Blowout YouTube Playlist where Arcmaevotix is home to the original versions and Nehrpsyznet is home to the remade versions.
Process
BNSC started development first out of the three projects and was an eSports organization project that was created to showcase the potential for Bomberman to have online eSports scene that would feature plenty of the classic games along with the modern ones through use of netplay, custom servers, and official online servers. The design of the organization was influenced largely by the competitive scenes for games such as Panel de Pon (aka Tetris Attack or Puzzle League), Super Smash Bros. Melee, and whatever fleeting visions there were of competitive Bomberman events. Prior to any kind of event hosting, BNSC went through extensive brand kit design as its social media and broadcasting pages were launched over the course of two months. About a year after BNSC launched and went into hibernation, 16SBMHD was born to realize what a remake of the Super Nintendo Bomberman games would look like. Most of the titles featured within competitive reels of Bomberman gameplay were either of the Super Bomberman series or titles that released on the SEGA Saturn (such as Saturn Bomberman). This project took about triple the development time of BNSC since one was simply an eSports organization, while the other was a full-blown working game concept demo. This meant researching the original games (such as Super Bomberman 1) to a comprehensive degree and then enhancing them. Bomberman Story Online fell somewhere in-between BNSC and 16SBMHD in terms of the scope of work since it was largely just an interface teaser that presented the idea of Bomberman Tournament (known as Bomberman Story in Japan) being a multiplayer online title.
Reflection
Being able to further explore brand kit design, game design, game development, interface design, broadcasting, and other areas of digital design made this project collection quite difficult to pursue but incredibly rewarding. BNSC is set to return in the future with the newfound skills that I have gained with other broadcasting projects and I want to see it grow into a full-fledged community. 16SBMHD was one of the longest projects that I continuously worked on with development taking around 26 months to fully realize the concept. Out of all of the projects however, Bomberman Story Online assisted me the most in becoming more comfortable with creating animated mockups that can act as live demonstrations for pitches.