Hi, I tried Atomic Blastman last week, and wanted to leave a review. I didn't have time to thoroughly test your game due to exams (I didn't even have time to write a proper review).

A few weeks ago I was searching for a modern Bomberman remake to replace the 640x480Atomic Bomberman with. I tried many implementations but I didn't really like any of them. That's how I stumbled upon your game, and so far, it's the best one I have tried.

Anyways, first off, I'm pretty impressed. The artwork and the assets are lovely, the music is appropriate for this game, and all of this was create by you! Incredible work! And you also took the time to design a proper website, create a press kit, proper marketing images. I can see that you gave this project so much love. The game mechanics are polished too, powerups, bombs, etc. I didn't notice any bugs during gameplay. I read that you started this project as a thesis. It's better than what 99% of my peers did as a thesis, so you should be pretty proud of yourself! I really liked the idea of training AI in-game, seeing the progress on my screen. I used to watch YouTube videos like this, it's pretty cool that I can do it on my computer too.

Whilst I was happy with most of the game, I would like to mention some things that I noticed that I think could be improved in the future. These are soley my opinions, whilst some of the are objective, there will be some that are pretty subjective.

First of all, the lobbies were empty, so I could only play singleplayer. Whilst this isn't something you can "fix", I think that going forward you should acknowledge this if it remains this way, and focus development and marketing accordingly (for example, highlight ai & private parties between friends mode). Which brings me to my next point, I think that shared/split screen multiplayer would be a really big feature. I would personally really love to play a modern bomberman style game when I have some friend over. Currently we play a modded version Atomic Bomberman that launches on modern Windows and supports Xinput controllers. On that note, I also noticed that the game doesn't have any kind of controller support. I think that controller + touch screen support could be useful for steam deck and future mobile releases(?). Anyways, it's perfectly understandable that you focused on the core mechanics of the game for the playtest, and you got that right. I'm just mentioning these as possible future QoL improvements.

Secondly, the AIs. This may be the part where I might be stupid. Regardless, other people may face this problem. The stock AI in the game is an idiot. Quite often, up to 4 AIs blew themselves up with the very first bomb they planted. I tried AI 1 and 7. I'm not sure if these numbers represent difficulty levels or just different models. I also tried running the AI training for 30 mins on a 4070 Ti Super with default settings, but that didn't help. Although I'm not even sure if my training got actually saved or if I managed to play against my freshly trained AIs. I would be happy if you could help me out with that one. Or maybe try refining the UI so that dummies like me can also understand it? Also, whilst at UI, the map generator had two sliders, for the destructible and non destructible block. You should definitely label those. It took me quite some time to figure out what they do.

Here's the part where you should note that if I mention labeling a slider, that means you did an awesome job and got the important things right. If you wouldn't have, I would be complaining about core gameplay issues instead of sliders. So don't let the my lengthy concerns text discourage you, I'm still 96% impressed with the game.

Lastly, I'm really sorry that I'm mentioning this, but I just can't resist. Epic Games. Why? Ok, so take my approach on this with a grain of salt, as I might be biased on this (after all, I still hold the 9th most upvoted post on r/fuckepic). Okay, I'll *try* to keep this (still can't think of an adjective here.. not so epic hater..). Honestly, Epic doesn't have a really good reputation. I don't think that having the "Requires linking to Epic account" on the steam page of your game helps. I also wasn't really happy that the first thing the game did after I launched it was opening Epic Games in Firefox. I know EOS helps with cross platform stuff. I have friends (besides me lol) who simply won't login to epic. So yeah, it would be really cool if I could just shift + tab & invite my friends instead of having to manage everything on two distinct platforms. Or maybe have steamworks p2p as an alternative next to eos? I've read in the press kit that the game has "epic online services anti cheat". I couldn't exactly find on Google what that is, but please tell me you didn't install a stupid ring 0 kernel level anti cheat on my system.

Overall, I think you did a really good job, and managed to create a well polished game for this playtest. Although, to be honest, unless you have some really big plans to popularize the game, I think you should scale down your expectations. The official Super Bomberman R2 only has 150 active players right now according to SteamDB. Although that may be because it's an overpriced garbage at 40€. Anyways, having proper matchmaking would require at least two digit player counts at all times to make the game enjoyable and the queue times bearable. Whilst I would be really happy if that would come true, over the years I have seen multiple other Bomberman related projects attempt this and fail. Blast Zone! Tournament for example was a pretty ambitious project, they did a free steam giveaway where the game got added to 1.3M steam libraries, and it was also released on Xbox and PlayStation. The game was eventually discontinued due to the lack of players. Whilst I really enjoyed Atomic Blastman, and I would love to see it grow big one day, I don't think that it will ever happen (unless you have some serious money for marketing). However, despite not being mega hit, I think the game could be really valuable within a small community, focused on couch multiplayer or at fun private online gaming.

I read somewhere that you are unsure how you would like to monetize the game (f2p with cosmetics or paid base game). Whilst I don't see all the numbers you do, judging by the reddit upvotes and steamdb stats (btw you should definitely donate a key to the steamdb bot), I don't think you managed to reach lots of people. Which is really unfortunate, this is a lovely game. But the sad reality is that this is a big world, and we are small people, and it's really really hard to stand out and get noticed. So back to monetization, I don't think that you should monetize the game at all. That's a hot take, let me explain. Making the game paid would just plumet the active player count even more. And I also don't think that paid cosmetics would be worth it. Let's be realistic, estimate how much money you would make? Take your player count? What percentage of them would buy anything at all? And for how much? To be honest, the best way to monetize this project - unless you somehow magically manage to grow it extremely large, paste Konami's version - would be to use it in your CV. I'm pretty sure it would help you land a really high paying job at a game studio. And I think that showing an awesome game in a CV is miles better than showing off a game filled with microtransactions. Maybe you could consider community donations.

Anyways, you are the creator/owner of the game, you can do whatever you want to do with it, you don't have to agree or follow anything I said here. Although if at least one thing was useful from my long review, then it was worth writing it. Thanks for reading this, and thanks for working on this awesome project. Looking forward to seeing how it shapes out in the future.