Rebound

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Overview

Rebound is a bouncing ball game for the Game Boy Color by DevEd: a platform game where you control a bouncing ball, Boink, and must make your way through each stage by bouncing off of things. Enemies can be defeated by bouncing on them from above.

Work on it began after the Game Boy Competition 2021 was announced. The first thing written was a parallax scrolling routine, which is tricky on the Game Boy's single background layer, and the game was made Game Boy Color only to take advantage of the GBC's double-speed mode and HDMA transfers. Boink's sprites were later reworked after assistant artist Twoflower suggested new shading.

The competition release is a demo, updated from version 1.0 to 1.4.2 over the last days of September 2021.

Made by: DevEd
Released: 2021

Controls guide

Playing

Button and key	Action
Left/Right	Roll left or right; Boink keeps bouncing by itself
A`X`	Hold as you land for a high bounce, or as you hit a wall for a higher wall bounce; let go while rising to cut the bounce short
B`Z`	Hold as you land for a low bounce; while held, Boink stops ricocheting off walls
Down	Hold to fall through platforms that can only be landed on from above
Start`Enter`	Pause and resume

Title screen

Button and key	Action
Start`Enter`	Start the game
Select`Shift`	Open the sound test

Sound test

Button and key	Action
Left/Right	Previous or next song
B`Z`	Back to the title screen

Debug menus

Button and key	Action
Up/Down	Move the cursor
Left/Right	Level select: jump 16 entries at a time
A`X`	Choose the entry, or play the sound in the SFX test
B`Z`	Level select and SFX test: back to the debug menu

Cheatsheet

Things in the levels

Coin: Collected by touching it; the count is shown next to the $ in the corner
1-up: One extra life, up to 99
Goony: Walking enemy: bounce on it while falling to knock it away, touch it while rising and you lose a life
Fish: Swims left and right, up and down, or in circles; deadly to touch from any side
Water: Every bounce is half as high while Boink is under water
Stage exit: Bounce off the right-hand edge of the last screen

The demo

Lives: 5 at the start; game over when the last one is lost
Stages: Plain Plains 1 to 6, followed by the end screen

Tips

Whether a Goony dies or Boink does depends only on which way Boink is moving: coming down onto it is a kill, touching it on the way up is a lost life. Wait for the top of a bounce before drifting over one.
Fish cannot be stomped at all, so in water, where bounces are only half height, hold A to get the most clearance over them.
Letting go of A while rising halves the ball's upward speed on the spot, which is the way to make short, precise hops onto narrow ledges.
Holding A when you hit a wall gives a tall wall bounce that can climb shafts, while holding B makes walls simply stop the ball instead of sending it back.
Hold Down to sink through thin one-way platforms instead of bouncing on them when the route continues below.

Secrets

Debug menu

On the title screen press Up, Up, Down, Down, Right, Left, Up, Down. A 1-up sound confirms it. Then press Start to open the debug menu with Start Game, Level Select, Sound Test and SFX Test. Only the first seven level select entries (Test Map and Plain Plains 1 to 6) exist in this demo; the rest are names of unfinished worlds such as Central City and Forlorn Forest.

Sound test

Press Select on the title screen to go straight to the sound test, which plays the game's songs with a visualizer. Left and Right change song, B returns to the title.