My twelfth game is complete! Bouncy Planet is my tenth #onegameamonth game, and I’m very proud of it. The theme this month was “Childhood,” and Bouncy Planet is the story of a child playing with a solar system made of bouncy balls. You can play as General Mean, a villain determined to ram all the planets and knock them out of orbit, or as Star Captain, the hero who must shoot him down in order to protect Bouncy Planet. Or you can switch back and forth at will and do whatever you want – they’re your toys, after all.

I decided to get really ambitious with this one and increase the production values. Because I was planning something bigger than I’m used to, I got some help with this one from Richard. He did the enemy AI, the smoke effects, and the background stars. It was interesting working with another person, especially one whose coding philosophy is so different from my own. The code (and its entire history) is available here, by the way, in case you were curious how this whole thing came together, or if you want to see little graphs of who did what and when. This is definitely the most complex game I’ve ever made, from a programming perspective. Probably even from a gameplay perspective. Is it the best game I’ve made so far? I’ll leave that judgment to you.

A couple words of advice for playing the game: When in doubt, slow down. When flying, it is a far, far better thing to undershoot than to overshoot. If you’ve not played yet, trust me on this. If you have played, you already found out the hard way. Also, you can dismiss the “speech bubbles” (I call them “talk boxes”) by pressing Enter. This is much more convenient while flying than using the mouse. You can also pause and unpause with Esc. Oh, and the game has six possible endings: four endings for Star Captain, one for General Mean, and one special ending for dawdlers.

I worked really hard on this one all month long, so I’m glad to be done with it. I’m also pretty satisfied with how it turned out. I hope you enjoy it as much as I have!