Bounce Back
by crazygames
Bounce Back
by crazygames
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A Game Overview
The JS13k competition has been going on every year since 2012 but this was my first year entering. Participants get 1 month to make an original 13 kilobyte JavaScript game. This year the theme was “Back” and there were 245 entries! Bounce Back got 2nd place!
My game “Bounce Back” is a procedurally generated adventure game using a boomerang as the primary weapon. I was inspired to create an homage to one of my favorite games “Zelda: Link’s Awakening”. The game was mostly written from scratch and took about two weeks to complete. For the past few months I’ve been practicing JavaScript every day and learning more about game design. So I pulled out all the stops and put everything I’ve learned into practice, hopefully it shows!
In this post I will explain how my game works and the process I went through. Before reading, please take a few moments to play the game if you haven’t already.
Game Concept
Legend has it that while working on “Zelda: Breath of the Wild” a team at Nintendo developed a prototype using art from the original NES Zelda game.
That concept applied to Link’s Awakening for Game Boy comprised my main inspiration for the project. I chose a boomerang for the player’s weapon to satisfy the theme and the game just flowed out from there. During development it helped to imagine this game as kind of an alternate universe Zelda.
Another goal of mine was to deliver something that feels like a complete experience regardless of the size limit. While 13k may not seem like much to the average dev, for serious code golfers it’s a mountain of space. Also an entire month is also a fairly long time to polish a game of this size. So I wanted to push the format as much as possible, and hopefully make something that players will keep coming back to.
