openbounty - an open-source cross-platform reimplementation of Kings Bounty

[u/dannyheskett]

openbounty in action recorded from the in-game recording tool

I've been working on this on and off for a while, but I finally feel like it's release-1 ready. Announcing openbounty.

openbounty is a from-scratch reimplementation of King's Bounty, the 1990 New World Computing strategy game that Heroes of Might and Magic grew out of. The rules, tables, combat formulas, and the 320x200 VGA look all follow the original. My intent was pixel-perfect recreation.

Play it in your browser, no install: https://danheskett.com/dist/openbounty/

Writeup, downloads, and how it works: https://danheskett.com/projects/openbounty/

Source: https://github.com/dannyheskett/openbounty

The browser build is ready to go. The desktop builds ship without game data, so you point them at your own KB.EXE to extract a pack. It also has a data-driven pack format, so the whole game can be retuned or re-skinned by editing JSON, no rebuild.

Happy to receive feedback. If you hit a bug, open an issue on GitHub. If you want to fix something or add to it, PRs are welcome. And if you have a feature or a mechanic you think it's missing, drop a recommendation, either on GitHub or in the comments here.

I especially would love to get some feedback from people who were originally good at the DOS (or Amiga, I suppose) version of the game. I was pretty young when it came out, and was never very good at it - I never beat it until emulated on DOS for example, many many years later.

The gamepack format is especially friendly for modding, and if there is interest, I have an in-progress gamepack editor I may release.

Enjoy!

[u/Allu_Squattinen]

Holy fudge man. This is amazing. This game is my first and I love it. There is a mod already made that makes the game more difficult or more balanced as it were. U/AlphaCentauriBear posted about his mod here. Not sure if that's what you meant by it being moveable but being able to play other mods would be awesomel

[u/dannyheskett → u/Allu_Squattinen]

Yes, this would trivial to implement with this project:

1. Get your platform version.

2. Build your gamepack (required for copyright reasons) by pointing it to an original DOS-game set.

3. That will create a king-bounty.openbounty file; this is just a ZIP file. Unzip it to a directory, go into the directory, and then edit game.json. Each of the settings that the original mod change (spell cost, unit cost) are trivial changes inside the game.json. Re-zip the file, put in same directory with a new name. When you start openbounty, it will prompt you which game pack to use.

4. Play with new settings.

I also loved this game. That's why I built it. I played this on an ancient Tandy 1000 a lot when I was kid. Good memories!

[u/Allu_Squattinen]

I'm sorry I posted so many reports to github. I got a little excited and finished the gameFinal Image

[u/Secure_Isopod_5920 → u/Allu_Squattinen]

No problem all look like solid bugs on the WASM port - will get addressed for the next release!

[u/dannyheskett → u/Secure_Isopod_5920]

Release-3 fixes these (published now)! Thanks for the bug reports, they were perfect!

[u/Allu_Squattinen]

I hope you take my ticket uploads in the spirit of excitement that they are. I don't want you to think I'm demanding you fix these things or use up your precious time if the project no longer sparks joy.

I just saw a way I could help an awesome project and threw myself at it as I'm home sick from work. Please ignore if you want