Bounce Back

About the game

Bounce Back is a small action roguelite seen from above. You play a hooded wanderer whose only weapon is a boomerang. Throw it towards the mouse pointer and it flies out, bounces off the walls and comes back to your hand; anything it passes through on the way gets hit, both going out and coming back. Until it returns, you are unarmed.

Each run starts in a hub with a shop and a portal. Beyond the portal are ten levels built at random from a maze of grassy clearings, sand and bushes surrounded by the void, each with a handful of enemies in three kinds, plus giant and invisible variants that appear as you go deeper. Clear a level and the way to the next one opens. The tenth ends with a boss. You have three hearts, and when they are gone the run is over, but the coins you collected stay with you, to spend in the shop on hearts and boomerangs before the next attempt. Beat the game once and a speed run mode opens up.

Frank Force made Bounce Back for js13kGames 2019, whose theme was "Back", and the whole game, including its procedural music and sixteen sound effects, fits in a zip file of 13 kilobytes.

Playing it here

This is the version on the js13kGames site, the one the author updated after the competition with a few retouched tiles. Click Play, then click inside the game to give it focus: it shows "-paused-" whenever it does not have it, and sound starts with your first click. Walk to the portal in the hub to begin. Your coins, the furthest level you reached and your best speed run time are kept in this browser; a warp portal in the hub takes you back to the furthest level.

Controls

A few things worth knowing

Dashing protects you. You take no damage while dashing, so a dash is the way through a crowd, not just a way to move faster.

Use the walls. The boomerang bounces, so a throw at an angle can reach enemies hiding around a corner and hit them again on the way back.

Sand slows everyone. Enemies wade through it as slowly as you do, which makes it a good place to fight from a distance.

Know your boomerangs. The yellow boomerang can grab pickups for you, and the blue one does double damage. A lost boomerang shows up big on the minimap.

Death is not a waste. Coins stay after you die, so even a short run buys something useful for the next one.

Credits and licence

Bounce Back was created by Frank Force, who wrote the code, drew the tiles and made the music and sound effects, using his own tiny sound generator, ZzFX (MIT licence). The game is free software under the GNU General Public License, version 2 or later. The licence texts and the complete source code of this build are linked from this page.