Booga

Booga is a small 2D arcade-platform game inspired by the 1983 classic Boogaboo (The Flea).

You are a flea.

You are at the bottom of a cave.

Being a flea, walking out like a normal person is apparently not an option.

Instead, you must jump from ledge to ledge, carefully choosing the direction and strength of every leap while avoiding the various creatures that consider a trapped flea an unexpected catering opportunity.

Your objective is simple:

Get out of the cave.

How to Play

Booga is built around one basic action: jumping.

Unlike a conventional platformer, you do not continuously run around the level. Instead, each jump must be aimed and powered before committing to it.

Choose your direction, adjust the strength of the jump, and launch yourself toward the next safe piece of terrain.

Once airborne, gravity takes over.

There is no steering committee.

A badly judged jump may leave you somewhere inconvenient, somewhere dangerous, or considerably closer to the bottom of the cave than you intended.

Controls

• LEFT / RIGHT — choose the direction and adjust jump power
• CTRL — look around
• F4 — pause / resume

The Jump

The heart of Booga is its deliberately simple jump system.

Before jumping, choose whether to leap left or right and determine how much power to use.

More power means:

• greater horizontal distance,
• greater height,
• and considerably more opportunity to regret the decision.

Every jump therefore becomes a small calculation involving distance, height, landing space and whatever happens to be waiting at the destination.

There are no convenient mid-air corrections once the flea has committed itself.

Fleas, apparently, respect Newtonian mechanics.

The Cave

The cave is built around fixed platforms, irregular terrain and vertical progression.

Some routes are obvious.

Others require careful positioning, stronger jumps or a little experimentation.

And naturally, the cave is not unoccupied.

Various creatures inhabit the depths, including things substantially larger than you and therefore automatically promoted to management.

Your best defensive strategy is generally to avoid arriving where they are.

Features

• Precision jumping rather than conventional platform movement.
• Adjustable jump direction and power.
• Physics-based jumping and gravity.
• Vertical cave exploration.
• Hostile cave inhabitants.
• Pixel/grid-based collision system.
• Retro arcade-inspired gameplay.
• Fast, self-contained levels.
• No installation — runs directly in the browser.

A Little History

Booga is heavily inspired by Boogaboo (The Flea), released in 1983.

The original was one of those wonderfully minimal early computer games built around a single strong mechanic: calculate a jump, commit to it, and discover whether your confidence was justified.

Rather than trying to modernize that idea into a conventional platformer, Booga keeps the unusual rhythm of the original:

stop, aim, jump, survive.

The graphics, engine, levels and implementation are new, but the tiny suicidal flea remains spiritually intact.

Under the Hood

Booga was written in JavaScript and runs in the browser using my custom LaughingSkull 2D WebGL engine.

The game uses a grid-based world combined with pixel-accurate collision masks. Terrain can therefore remain visually irregular while the engine still performs fast spatial queries for movement, enemies and collision detection.

The player movement is driven by a small physics system using velocity, acceleration and gravity rather than predefined jump animations.

Levels are created with my own map-editing tools, including automatically generated collision masks with additional manual editing where the terrain requires more persuasion.

Booga also became another useful excuse to expand the reusable 2D parts of the LaughingSkull ENGINE.

Making one flea jump naturally required several thousand lines of infrastructure.

As these things do.

Play Booga

▶ Play Booga on LaughingSkull.org

Free to play. No account. No installation.

The way out is up.

Unfortunately, so is almost everything trying to kill you.