FROZEN-BUBBLE(1)

📦
version 2.2.1 · 2 versions
, in fedora 43

💖 FROZEN-BUBBLE(1) 💖

okay bestie, welcome to the User Contributed Perl Documentation for frozen-bubble, and honestly? you're about to have the cutest arcade obsession of your life. sit down, grab a snack, we're doing this 🫶

✨ NAME ✨

frozen-bubble — it's an arcade/reflex game, and it will absolutely eat your afternoon, no cap.

✨ SYNOPSIS ✨

frozen-bubble [OPTION]...

✨ DESCRIPTION ✨

so the Frozen-Bubble game is a free software implementation of a popular arcade/reflex game (iykyk). the whole vibe is: you fire randomly chosen bubbles across the board. if your shot lands and makes a clump of at least 3 bubbles of the same colour, they all pop 💥 and if some bubbles were sticked only on the popping clump, they fall too. gravity said bye.

in 1-player mode, your goal is to pop all the bubbles on the board as quickly as possible. in 2-players or network mode, you have to get your opponent to "die" before you do. main character energy only, bestie 👑

✨ CONTROL ✨

the default controlling mechanism is through the keyboard, but you can absolutely play with a joystick or a joypad if it is supported by the system. pro tip: use the commandline option -ji to make sure frozen-bubble detected your joysticks 👀

you need a key (or a joystick direction or button) for:

  • moving the aim to the left
  • moving the aim to the right
  • center
  • fire

that's it. four things. you got this.

🌸 1-PLAYER GAME 🌸

in single player mode, if you're a beginner, the best training is to choose Play Default Levelset — it lets you run through 100 levels of an increasing difficulty. pop all the bubbles of each level to advance to the next one. literally a glow-up arc 🦋

if you want to train for multiplayer, choose Multiplayer Training, which reproduces the conditions of 2-player or network mode. the only difference is that created malus bubbles are counted in your score, and you must get the highest score you can in 2 minutes. timer's ticking, bestie ⏰

💅 2-PLAYERS GAME 💅

in 2-players mode, you can play against a friend (or a foe, actually — we don't judge) on the same computer. the board is populated with random bubbles, and your goal is to make big clumps to send malus bubbles to your opponent. sabotage, but make it cute 😌

🌈 NETWORK GAME 🌈

if your computer has networking, you can choose LAN GAME to play games against others on your local network (up to 5 players). Frozen-Bubble will look for a game server on the local network with a UDP broadcast, connect to it if found, or start a new game server if not found. it just handles it, periodt.

if your computer is connected to Internet, you can choose NET GAME to play against others on Earth (or beyond?). Frozen-Bubble will retrieve the server list from the master server and propose you to choose between available servers. the flag in front of a server indicates the preferred language for chatting with others before the game is started. the ping is the roundtrip when talking with the server — choose a low ping when possible, low ping is the moment ✨

👑 OPTIONS 👑

  • --help — show command-line options summary
  • --fullscreen — start the game in fullscreen mode
  • --no-fullscreen — don't start the game in fullscreen mode
  • --no-sound — disable music and sound effects
  • --no-music — disable music (but not sound effects)
  • --no-sfx — disable sound effects (but not music)
  • --playlist directory — use all files of the given directory as music files and play them
  • --playlist file — use all files listed in the given file as music files and play them
  • --slow-machine — use this option if frozen-bubble runs too slowly on your machine (disables a few animations)
  • --very-slow-machine — same as before, if it is not enough (disables all that can be disabled)
  • --solo — directly start solo (1p) game, with random levels
  • --direct — directly start 2p game (don't display menu)
  • --gameserver host[:port] — directly start NET/LAN game connecting to this game server (if port is omitted, default port is used)
  • --chain-reaction — enable chain-reaction
  • --level number — start directly the game, at level number
  • --colour-blind — use special bubbles for colourblind people
  • --no-time-limit — disable time limit for shooting (e.g. kids mode)
  • --player-malus number — add number malus to the left player (can be negative - doesn't work in network mode)
  • --mp-training-difficulty number — set the average duration between receiving malus bubbles in 1 player multiplayer training (default 30 (= every 30 seconds on average), the lower the harder)
  • --joysticks-info — print information about detected joystick(s) on startup (if Frozen-Bubble doesn't see your joysticks/joypads, try loading the joydev module with modprobe joydev as root, then retry)
  • --no-echo — when sound is enabled, disable echoing each typed character with a typewriter sound (it may get on your nerves)
  • --my-nick nick — for NET/LAN games, use this nick instead of username (max 10 chars, ASCII alphanumeric plus dash and underscore only) - notice that the /nick command is also available when connected to a server to set your nick
  • --private — after connecting to a server for a NET game, don't use http://hostip.info/ to retrieve your geographical position to send it to other players
  • --record directory — specify the recording directory (normally, records are saved in the directory .frozen-bubble/records down your home directory)
  • --auto-record — automatically record all applicable games (normally, a record is triggered by hitting the Print Screen key during a game)
  • --comment '...' — add the comment enclosed between simple quotes to records (must not contain anything else than ASCII), it will be shown on console when playing back the record later
  • --replay record_file|URL — playback the specified record file
  • --save-frames directory — specify a directory where all (game) frames will be recorded; as the game is slowed down, can only be used with --replay; warning, output is huge as 50 frames of each 900 KB are saved per second (e.g. 43 MB per second); a typical use case is then to build a video out of the frames with e.g. this kind of command:
mencoder mf:///tmp/fbframes/frame* -mf fps=50 -o /tmp/output.avi -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4
🚨 bestie, real talk: --save-frames output is huge. like, 50 frames of each 900 KB per second huge. that's 43 MB per second. also it can only be used with --replay, because the game is slowed down. don't say I didn't warn you 😭

🎀 AUTHOR 🎀

Written by Guillaume Cottenceau. This manual page was originally written by Josselin Mouette <josselin.mouette at ens-lyon.org>.

Visit official homepage: <http://www.frozen-bubble.org/>

💜 SEE ALSO 💜

  • frozen-bubble-editor

Copyright © 2000-2010 The Frozen-Bubble Team.

This is Free Software; this software is licensed under the GPL version 2, as published by the Free Software Foundation. There is NO warranty; not even for MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.

and that's the whole page, bestie 🫶 this was documented by the perl v5.42.0 girlies on 2025-07-23 — now go pop some bubbles, you absolute icon 💅✨🌈

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