Bubbles for Pocket PC 2002 Overview About Bubbles...

Bubbles is a board game designed for use on the Pocket PC. The game starts with a board full of colored balls (called bubbles). Adjacent bubbles with the same color can be removed from the board. The more bubbles you remove in a turn, the more points you score. When you clear the entire board you get bonus points.

The game is easy to learn, but hard to master. That's the beauty of it. When you first try the game then it seems easy, until you hear that other people score over 3000 points (using standard settings). Scores typically range from just above 1000 points until over 5000 points. The highest possible score with default settings is 9050, however the highest score I have seen was just above 5000. The game is very addictive, so beware before you install it on your Pocket PC. The creation and evolution of Bubbles

Dutch attendees of TechED 2000 in Amsterdam received a free Compaq iPaq. It's a Pocket PC running Windows CE v3.0 and it's great piece of hardware. A friend of mine had a Psion Revo, which is shipped with a great game called Cascade. During TechED I got a C++ compiler for the Pocket PC, so I started writing a Cascade clone.

The first version was already finished before I got my Pocket PC, so it was tested in emulation only. It was written using MFC for CE, but I threw away MFC pretty early and replaced it with the ATL window classes. Unfortunately the WTL library isn't available for CE yet, so I couldn't use it. The ATL version works with all Win32 platforms, including Windows 95/98/ME and Windows NT/2000. The bare game was only 32Kb in size on the CE platform (including bitmaps, sound, etc...). The desktop version was almost twice as big (although it was 99% code compatible).

Nearly a month after TechED 2000 I finally got my Pocket PC and I downloaded Bubbles. It worked right out of the box, so the emulation is probably pretty good. Several friends of mine also have a Pocket PC, so I shared the first versions among them and the race for the highest score had begon. Bubbles was a big hit, so I wanted to extend the application, so it looks better and had some added features. I was little bit disappointed when I found out that other developers had created the same game (see the bottom of this page for links). Decide which game you like the most and keep it. I like Bubbles the most, but my opinion might not be very objective. What's hot and what's not

The current version of Bubbles is sufficient for a whole lot of fun. It has the following features:

Three different levels of difficulty (easy, moderate and hard).
Highscore list, so you have prove when you reach a good score. It's also possible to reset the list of highscores.
Synchronizing highscores with other Bubbles users using the infrared port.
Single move undo, so you can always go back to the previous state when you accidently hit the wrong bubble.
Very neat about dialog, which is similar to the picture shown at the top of this page. The logo is created using POV-Ray.
Full source code available, so you can customize and extend it the way you want. Maybe you can even learn something. Please send any improvements to me, so I can include them into Bubbles.

Some features are still missing. I might implement it in a future version, but don't expect anything soon. The following features are planned:

Double tap support, which can be found in other Cascade clones. It looks very nice, but I personally like single tapping. Tapping the wrong bubble by accident isn't a problem, because there is a single level undo. Nothing has been done to implement this feature (well, I did add an additional checkbox to the options window).
Several different skins for the bubble bitmaps. The problems isn't designing new bitmaps (has already been done) or painting the other bitmaps (just loading another resource). The real pain is selecting new bitmaps in a pretty way.
Help file for the game, explaining the various options and rules of the game.

Links

Although my version is probably the only Cascade-like game, which has source included, it's not the only clone around. This is a list of other Cascade clones for the Pocket PC or desktop:

PocketPop looks very much like Bubbles and is also free of charge. PocketPop uses a different method of removing items from the matrix. The first time you hit a bal, it shows which balls will be removed and how many points you get. The second time it actually removes the balls. You can easily see how many points you get for a certain action, which is pretty neat. If I had known about PocketPop, I would probably never started Bubbles at all.
Bubblets is a commercial Cascade clone, which looks pretty good, but it costs money and why pay if you can get it for free?
Pocket Marbles is also a commercial Cascade clone, which doesn't look very good. It has no options that cannot be found in freeware versions. Hardly worth mentioning, but I wanted to be complete in this list.
A friend of mine created a Bubbles clone in Java and can be played on the net. It also has a highscore list on it, so try to beat the best so far.
Bubbles can also be found on the net. It has been reviewed by several magazines and most people like it a lot.

If you know about more Cascade clones, please mail me. Legal statement

This program is copyrighted by Ramon de Klein and distributed under terms of the GNU General Public License.