The Bounerim

The Bounerim v1.2

Release type: Shareware
Release date: 1993 (original release)
Levels: 10
Author: Don'Pan Software
Registration bonus: Bounerim II: The Bounce Back
Registration price: $20
Related games: Fluffy Ralph, Bounerim II: The Bounce Back

With A-J’s Quest I had implemented the game I had bought Game-Maker to implement, to mixed but generally positive results. With Cireneg's Rings and Linear Volume I had tried to extend the life of my purchase by showing off to my friends. In the process I hit several hard boundaries: there were no live text fields; the player couldn’t make persistent changes to the environment. I felt stuck, and could see no way out besides waiting for improvements to the game engine — so my attention drifted.

I fell back to Deluxe Paint, a program that I felt I had well mastered and that had carried my attention since middle school. I had a stockpile of images and brushes; I had a hacker’s mind for palette cycling and gradients. I felt no boundaries there.

It is at this point that I noticed RSD’s Graphics Image Reader tool. Its purpose is to import 256-color raster images, and their indexed palettes, into RSD’s own formats. Until then I had ignored it, as RSD’s own tile editing tools were more than adequate and I wasn’t really up on image file formats.

RSD’s tool read .GIF files, and that was… confusing. I didn’t know of any painting programs that even saved in .GIF format. Deluxe Paint saved in the Amiga-centric .LBM, and the slightly more widespread .PCX. Beyond that… well, to my mind it didn’t matter. Deluxe Paint was what I used, and only there did the colors cycle and brushes rest in their own little cupboard.

Around here, though, I discovered the modem on my father’s 286. Day after day I would dial up local boards and explore their download directories. I found image management tools like Graphics Workshop (sort of the Adobe Lightroom of its day), and I found extensive libraries of 320×200, 256-color .GIF files. Some of them were even photographs — and such clear ones, at that!

I began to convert my own Deluxe Paint illustrations to .GIF files, to upload them for board credits. While I was at it, I chose to tinker with RSD’s importing tools. There are a couple of ways I could have tackled this. What I wound up doing was adapting my Deluxe Paint brushes into Game-Maker sprites. When it seemed workable, I would rescale one of my larger drawings and turn it into its own sprite.

Parallel to this, I got my first sound card — a new Sound Blaster Pro. It came with a rather clean, user-friendly tool for recording Creative’s proprietary .VOC format, which happened to coincide both with the demands of RSD’s engine and with the format of online sound libraries. So while I filled my junk drawer with random externally derived sprites, I also built up an archive of random audio samples. Some of them were original; some derived or taken from online libraries.

Reaching for a point in The Bounerim

After a few months these archives achieved a sort of a critical mass, and I figured it was time to either make use of them or to move on to other projects. Thus the brushes became monsters and the samples became a sound set. Groucho Marx, pushpins, sugared cake doughnuts, and biplanes were ready to terrorize a minimal-effort landscape. To create the levels, really I just drew two tiles — a foreground and a background — and then blurred a few edges between the two.

That just left the matter of a protagonist.

Warp 1 of The Bounerim

During all of that .GIF importing, I experimented with a few downloaded or demonstration images. One in particular, a slightly terrifying close-up of a clown face, became a focal point. I tried to import it and chop it into tiles. That didn’t work. I tried to shrink it down into a 20×20 sprite. The result was… strange. So I compromised; rather than importing the whole image, I picked a key feature — the clown’s red, shiny nose.

With a bit of editing, I had what I felt was a photo-realistic bouncy ball. For no sane reason I also selectively imported the clown’s eye, and animated a sequence where the nose turned into that eye.

Add in a few laser effects, assign the random sound samples to in-game actions, write a bizarre narrative justification for the proceedings, and we have The Bounerim.

For all its random origins, The Bounerim is the project where I began to understand 2D platformer design. After A-J’s Quest and its more-of-the-same sequel, it was my third attempt at a the genre — but those were a special case, designed in my head years before I had the tools to produce them. The Bounerim demanded that I think through the genre’s mechanics and implement them anew, and more than A-J’s Quest it established the style and techniques that I would use in all of my later games.

Of those, the most direct descendant would probably be Crullo. It’s got similar mechanics and a similar kind of a protagonist (based on the same brush used for one of Bounerim‘s monsters). On another level, Crullo is the first time that I really used Deluxe Paint as a primary tool for background and sprite design — whereas The Bounerim is the game that set that ball rolling. As it were.

- [Azurelore Korrigan]

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(Overview)	The Bounerim	Bounerim II
Bounerim series

Story

Level 4 of The Bounerim

You were an ordinary guy, well, at least pretty ordinary. While walking down the street one day, you saw a little green crystal on the sidewalk. You picked it up, and as soon as you did so, your mind started swirling. The sidewalk turned green and the sky into a mass of purple waves.

You regain your senses, but feel sort of strange. You try to stand up, but you don't feel any legs. You attempt to look around, but you can't turn your neck. You can, however, roll around. You gaze at your reflection in a polished spike jutting from the ground and see a rubber ball. You yelp at this, although you don't hear your voice, and hop back... about ten feet. When you land, you bounce another three feet or so. Suddenly, a voice booms out of the sky:

"You are now a bounerim. You are my prisoner. Don't even contemplate escaping. My guards will pop you before you can even start to roll."

You stop to think of what has happened, and realize that the green crystal had to have been what did this. You know that you somehow have to get it back. You roll forward a bit and see a strange purple hole in the middle of nothing. You get excited and when you run for it, you all of a sudden see about a hundred percent better than before and a swirling beam of light comes from your pupil. You think, "This is a strange place, whatever it is."

Instructions

Level 3 of The Bounerim

Up: Jump Up

Up-Left: Jump Left

Up-Right: Jump right

Left, Right: Roll Those Ways

<SPACE>: Shoot Normal Shot

B: Shoot Weak-But-Fast Shot

N: Shoot Slow-But Strong Shot

Credits

Level 2 of The Bounerim

A-J Games Team:

Games:

[Azurelore Korrigan]

Game Testers:

Jim Faux

Lan Hasty

Game Engine:

Recreational Software Designs (RSD)

Warp 2 of The Bounerim

Special Thanx to:

Oliver Stone

Strahd

Matt Bell

Q&A

Level 1 of The Bounerim

From what we can see, Bounerim is a labyrinthine platformer where you control a red ball that hides a laser-spitting eye. You mentioned several times that Orb: The Derelict Planet was one of your favourite G-M game. Was it an inspiration source here?

That's an interesting coincidence, since you mention it. Actually, the first I learned of Orb was the Game-Maker 3.0 CD-ROM. Although my memory is far from exact, I think that Bounerim was one of my earliest games. It may well be my second platformer, after A-J's Quest, and is probably contemporary with Cireneg's Rings, Linear Volume, and Gridline. So that's probably around mid-1993, I'm guessing.

If there's an inspiration, it was a bunch of self-produced clipart that I had sitting around. Deluxe Paint famously had a brush function, that people often used to store sprites or small portable images (thus the Monkey Island protagonist, Guybrush Threepwood). I had been using Deluxe Paint since the late 1980s, and so had built up a wealth of small images that I would occasionally stamp here and there, or just hang onto for posterity. I think that I took Bounerim as an opportunity to air a whole bunch of those resources at once, in what at the time struck me as a humorous jumble.

We fight against walking alarm clocks, hand-waving cacti, potatoes, pumpkins and... flying heads. Pretty unusual. Is that a reference to any co-worker?

No, aside from a chance to air random Deluxe Paint brushes there's no rhyme or reason to the adversaries.

The head is of course my personal hero, Groucho Marx.

We can hear that you had fun with the sounds on that one. Have they received a special attention?

Warp 3 of The Bounerim

I think from the moment that RSD added Sound Blaster support I kind of went overboard with the microphone and waveform editor. A common theme to my early to mid-era games is increasingly outlandish sound effects, especially in regards to monster death. One of these days I should probably compile a list of all of my monster death noises. My favorite may well be the one from Fluffy Ralph. But yes, much as with the sprites I think I gave this game a similar kitchen sink treatment. Aside from the rough concept of (generally) sharp things popping a ball, there's no logical order to this game at all.

If you're wondering what's sharp about Groucho Marx, then surely you haven't faced his wit.

Bounerim could be an afternoon project to show off how the thing works, but it could also be the prelude to something more ambitious (I guess counting the levels would tell). Had you a precise goal/motivation when you started it ?

Aside from what I've said, I think my only motivation was to experiment a bit more with side-scrolling platformer mechanics. I can trace a direct line from my work here to the much more polished Octolris, which I probably tackled fairly soon after. This may be the first time I really played with Game-Maker to see what it can do; A-J's Quest, I'd had planned for four years before I even heard of Game-Maker. Most of the other games that I did around the same time were facile edits of RSD's Sample and Terrain. Now that I think about it, before Bounerim I probably hadn't pushed either myself or the design tools very far.

There's an impressive amount of 1-UPs in that sample level. How tempting is it to hide such things in a game? It somehow makes you better prepared for battle compared to any one else, right?

Yes, my early tendency was for hidden passages and false walls all over the place. I still love a few of those, sensibly placed, but my placement was rarely sensible. One of the first comments I got from RSD is that they felt my use of false walls was kind of unfair for the player, so I took that on board and after my first few games I tried to dial them down a bit. As for why I have so many 1-Ups scattered around here... I couldn't say. I probably didn't think it through very deeply.

Availability

This game is distributed in the shareware directory of the Game-Maker 3.0 CD-ROM.

The game also seems to have been made available on several shareware compilation CD-ROMs. More precise details TBD.

Archive History

The Bounerim was retained as part of the archive from the game's inception.

Links

Interviews/Articles

• The History of A-J Games: Part Ten

Misc. Links

• Play The Bounerim online

Downloads

• The Bounerim (413.3 kB)
• Level 1 Map (320 kB)
  • Warp 1 Map (79 kB)
• Level 2 Map (86 kB)
  • Warp 2 Map (26 kB)
• Level 3 Map (122 kB)
  • Warp 3 Map (105 kB)
• Level 4 Map (250 kB)
  • Warp 4 Map (14 kB)
• Level 5a Map (82 kB)
  • Warp 5b Map (29 kB)