First itch.io upload!

I've kept my projects to myself for too long, and this is the first step to getting my creations out there. Bouncy Bonk has finally been released to the public yay!

I started this game back in the GMTK 2020 game jam, the theme of which was "Out of Control". Initially I thought of platformers where you can't control all of your movement, so first I started with a goomba that gently bounced off walls. That game was called "Mushy Peas" (coming soon to a website near you!). Since all the collision logic would take dangerously long to finish, I started afresh with Bouncy Bonk because Game Maker 8 had out-of-the-box collision handling for bouncing objects. This time around, vertical jumping was out-of-control as the ball couldn't manually jump but could accelerate horizontally which made the ball even more out-of-control. Unfortunately, I got so stuck into developing Bouncy Bonk that I missed the deadline. Whoops!

Three years and a uni graduation later, I was casually browsing the files on my laptop when I stumbled upon Bouncy Bonk again, which inspired me to finish it off. Spent two days on the final touches, which were quality of life improvements and Steam Deck compatibility, while keeping the original level geometry intact as it was still winnable. Was in for a rude awakening when I first added my compiled game to my Steam library for testing on the Deck (the version called BonkMaze2). BonkMaze2 ran painfully slowly and without sound through Proton 8.0-2 and the 3 in-game speed adjusting hotkeys didn't help. To fix this, I reduced room_speed to 60, added 6 more speed hotkeys to compensate for the lag and set all sound effects to run through the "media player" since that's the only way to play wavs from a Game Maker 8 game through Proton. (Strangely, Sexy Hiking's sound effects worked fine despite it being made in an even older Game Maker version).

Although Bouncy Bonk isn't as flawless as I wanted it to be, it's still playable enough to win, so I hope you can enjoy the janky challenge. The flaws boil down to limitations of an ancient engine and codec licensing issues for Proton, so the only "fix" is choosing a newer engine which natively supports Linux and/or accepts audio formats which Proton is licensed for.