Bumps

A casual puzzle game designed for children. Help free the eponymous Bumps by moving them into place, clicking “go”, and then watch as they roll and bounce around. Try to place the Bumps so that they collect all the keys to free their trapped friends! Though remember that each Bump can only collect the keys corresponding to its colour. Try and complete all 99 levels.

Where to play? §

There’s typically a few second hand copies floating around on eBay for a fairly cheap price. To my surprise you can also still purchase it brand new, over on Amazon, though I get no royalties.

Please note: in order to play Bumps on Windows Vista and later, it is necessary to first pass the game’s .exe through GM_Game_Convert.exe, which can be found in GM_Game_Convert.zip in the downloads section. The game was built on Windows XP, and so has compatibility issues with more recent releases of Windows.

GM_Game_Convert.exe was a tool created by Mark Overmars, the original author of Game Maker. It includes a Readme.txt explaining its usage. If you are trying to run old Game Maker games on any Windows OS from Windows Vista onwards, including e.g. Windows 10, then it is necessary to use this tool to make it compatible. Otherwise the game will fail to run with an unhelpful error message. See this answer for more a little more context.

Credits §

Bumps was developed by Utopian Games, who consisted of:

• Darren Spencer: Had the initial concept for the game, managed the team, handled publishing, and did much of the level design.
• Ben Reason: Music and sound.
• Hans Christian Hildenbrand: Art.
• Sam Hooke: Programming and also level design.

Downloads §

Gallery §

Appearances on the web §

• Wikipedia (Internet Archive)
• HandWiki
• GamePeople

Trivia §

• Bumps received some positive reviews in Indie Game Mag: Issue 5 (July/August 2009), whose cover story was an interview with Edmund McMillen, the designer behind Super Meat Boy.
• Bumps took six months to create, from concept through to retail copy (16th December 2088 to 3rd June 2009)
• We originally planned to have 100 levels, but went with 99 in the end, because the level select screen showed 9 levels per page, so it was simpler to just have 11 pages.
• There was a boss fight planned for the elusive final level, but sadly that never got made.
• Similar to how the Source Engine has a developer console that can be opened with tilde ("~"), some builds of Bumps have a developer console included, though I forget the key combination to open it.
• The physics was powered by the GMPhysics library, by coderchris, which was a wrapper around NVidia’s open-source PhysX library.
• Apart from the trivial shapes (e.g. circles), all physics objects in the game were defined by a GMPhysics SHAPE_LINE_LIST polygon, which had to be defined in code with a call to add_vertex(poly, x, y) for every single vertex in the polygon. Initially I did these in my head, or on pen and paper, but it grew labourious and error prone for complex shapes. To solve this problem, I created a simple tool boldly called “Poly Creator: Industrial Edition”, which let you load a sprite, draw the polygon, and export the Game Maker code. This tool was used by myself and Darren, but was not released publicly.

Example output from Poly Creator (Game Maker 6 code) §

//Code generated from poly creator industrial edition, made by marbs
poly=create_polygon();
add_vertex(poly,-51,20);
add_vertex(poly,-28,12);
add_vertex(poly,0,9);
add_vertex(poly,29,13);
add_vertex(poly,50,20);
add_vertex(poly,58,2);
add_vertex(poly,53,0);
add_vertex(poly,54,-9);
add_vertex(poly,28,-16);
add_vertex(poly,-24,-16);
add_vertex(poly,-55,-8);
add_vertex(poly,-53,0);
add_vertex(poly,-58,4);
mybody=create_body(x,y,1,SHAPE_LINE_LIST,poly);