Pyro Party

Learn all about this year's game.

Pyro Party is a custom multiplayer version of the popular arcade game Bomberman. Its action-packed gameplay allows for a wide variety of strategies and will result in a thrilling livestream. We tried to keep it as simple and minimalistic as possible. Here's everything you need to know.

Objective

The objective of Pyro Party is to be the last player standing by strategically placing bombs to eliminate opponents and destroy obstacles. That's it.

Preview of the Arena
Gameplay Mechanics
  • Each player controls a character (those round colorful thingies) on a grid-based arena.
  • The arena is filled with destructible and indestructible obstacles:
    • Destructable obstacles are placed randomly and colored green.
    • Indestructable obstacles are placed in a grid pattern and colored gray.
  • Players can move horizontally and vertically, but not diagonally. Although the arena has a grid, player can move continuously over tiles. There are no discrete steps.
  • Players can place bombs on empty spaces.
  • Bombs have a blast radius that can destroy obstacles and harm other players.
  • Every destructable obstacle has a 40% chance of dropping a powerup when destroyed.
  • Powerups increase a player's speed or bomb blast radius.
Rules
  • The game starts with all 4 players placed in the corners on the arena.
  • Players move simultaneously, not in turns.
  • Each player has one life. When a player loses this life, they are eliminated from the game.
  • Players can eliminate opponents by trapping them with bombs or causing them to be caught in the blast radius.
  • Bombs have a countdown timer of 2 seconds before they explode. Players must avoid their own bombs to prevent self-elimination.
  • When bombs are located inside eachothers blast radius, they will set of a chain reaction.
  • Indestructible obstacles cannot be destroyed, and players must navigate around them.
  • After one minute of gameplay, lava will start flowing from the corners. Make sure to avoid this, as it's quite deadly!
  • The game continues until only one player remains, who is declared the winner.
Technical Requirements
  • Participant must submit their bot as a single Python file with a maximum size of 1MB. You may upload as many bots as you like, though only one can be active at any time.
  • Your bot must implement the interface that we've provided as described in the tutorial.
  • Bots must connect to the game server at least 1 second after their execution started.
  • Bots cannot connect to the Internet.
  • All imports of external packages are forbidden, except:
    • Python's standard library modules
    • NumPy
    • Other packages upon request
  • Bots are run on an AWS EC2 t4g-xlarge virtual server inside a custom Docker container based on headless Ubuntu 22.04 for which 0.5 vCPU and 2GB RAM is reserved. The performance of your bot will thus be throttled if you require more compute resources.
  • Bots may not crash. If the execution of your Python file exits, your bot will instantly die.
Example Gameplay

You can take a look at the livestream on Twitch or the replay videos of passed games to get an idea of how the gameplay of Pyro Party looks.

Changelog Powerups 01/11

We've finally added powerups! This makes the game more exciting and allows for more strategies to tackle the battle and defeat your opponents.

Powerups will appear on the field if you blow up a tree. A tree will drop a powerup with a 40% chance upon being destroyed by a bomb. This powerup can be picked up by move to it and will give your bot a bonus. Depending on the type of powerup, your bot will be able to move around faster or the blast radius of its bombs will increase. The speed powerups are displayed as a lighting bolt, the bomb powerups as a bomb with a flame inside it. Do note that powerups will be destroyed by an explosion, so make sure that they don't get wasted.

Because these powerups are additional items and allow for different types of bombs, we needed to add more tile types to the list of possible game area tiles. This might cause breaking changes in your bot, so you're advised to review your code before the new game version goes live. More specifically, we've added the A and S tile types for bomb powerups and speed powerups respectively. On top of that, the types B, C, D, F and H denote bombs with blast radii of 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6 respectively. Bombs cannot have a range larger than 6 tiles.

These changes will kick into action starting on 01/11. The offline code already contains the new game mechanics. So be sure to submit an updated version of your bot before 31/10 at midnight (spooky spooky).

Code

The code for Pyro Party is available on UGent GitHub.