Robomber 06/07/2026

Remember back when Flash games were popular?

Well, Robomber is a testament to that era.

With its simple Bomberman-like gameplay, the game was once a heavily competitive and entertaining experience.

The game was originally developed in the early 2010s, and I believe it was shut down somewhere around early 2020.

Due to my obsession with Bomberman online games, I decided to put together a way to revive it and make it available for everyone to play again.

To achieve this, I started by searching all over the internet for a client .swf file containing the game's resources and client-side code. After several days of searching, I finally found a very old version of the client that would allow me to start digging around.

Just like every online game, the client was communicating with a server to send and receive data. Since the original server was no longer available, I had to make it from scratch.

After a few days of reverse engineering the client, I was able to understand how the game worked at a superficial level. Now all that needed to be done was to begin recreating the server from the ground up.

To achieve this, I settled on using Python as the programming language for the server, and I used the Twisted framework to handle the networking part of the server.

The main reason that led me to use Twisted was that it is a framework that I am incredibly familiar with, and one that I have used in the past for several other projects.

One of the biggest challenges that I faced while developing the server was understanding what the client was expecting to receive from the server, and how the server should behave when the client sent specific kinds of data.

This is where the reverse engineering part of the project came into play, and it made the project a lot more challenging than a regular server-client setup.

It was also very interesting to understand the original developer's packet structure and protocol, since the names used in the client were very cryptic and not very descriptive.

After several months of development, I was finally able to get the server to a point where it was stable enough to allow players to connect and play the game.

The server is still a work in progress, and I am constantly working on improving it and adding new features to it.

Most of these features are related to the game's chat system, and in the future, I plan on making it so that the chat can be used to moderate the game and report players that are breaking the rules.

If you're curious about the game's current state, here's a YouTube video showcasing the game in action.