My younger brother and I grew up on Boom Online — the Vietnamese version of CrazyArcade. Every day after school, we’d plant ourselves in front of the PC, place water balloons with surgical precision, and trap each other in corners until someone screamed. Peak sibling bonding.
Then the game shut down. Just… gone. The Korean and Chinese versions still exist, but they’re not our game. The maps we memorized. The skins we grinded for months to unlock. The absolute chaos of 8-player rooms where alliances lasted exactly 3 seconds. All of it — poof.
So naturally, instead of processing this loss like well-adjusted adults, we decided to rebuild the whole thing from scratch. With web tech. Because why grieve when you can over-engineer?
Working title is still Medieval Boom, because the Tiny Swords art pack we’re using gives everything a medieval-fantasy vibe — knights, archers, monks, pawns, and lancers throwing bombs at each other across a 15×13 grid. Pixel Frog’s art carries this entire project. We are eternally grateful.
It’s playable, right now, at boom.nkh.do. Open a room, share the code, fling bombs. Authoritative server, 60Hz tick, real multiplayer. Devlogs document the journey:
- Devlog #1 — tiles, bombs, bots that don’t immediately suicide
- Devlog #2 — sprites, map editor, classes
- Devlog #3 — multiplayer, tile pushing, 1/2 bomb placement, room chat
- Devlog #4 — mounts, consumables, effects system
- Devlog #5 — accounts, progression, economy, shop
- Smoothing Movement Jank — fixing discrete movement stutter with render-side interpolation Every time a bomb connects on screen, it feels like 2008 again. That’s enough to keep us going.
Tech Stack
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Vue 3 — lobby, map editor, results screens
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Phaser 4 — game engine and rendering
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Colyseus — authoritative multiplayer server, room management, state sync
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SQLite via Drizzle ORM — the database. A file on disk. More than enough when your concurrent player count has never broken ten. I sleep fine.
Credits
- Pixel Frog — Tiny Swords art pack (characters, tiles, VFX). Started using it for free, eventually bought it because guilt-based economics is a valid pricing model.
- BDragon1727 — Medal Icon Pack (rank badges)
- Harry Phung — enabler of my AI-assisted scope creep via a z.ai API key for GLM-5.1. Any feature that should’ve taken a week but shipped in a day is his fault.