Welcome to Baoncy

Hello everyone, I’d like to show you all to a preview of some of the first levels of a game I’ve been working on called Baoncy, an Indie game that I started working on roughly a year ago, and the first video game that I’ve ever made.

What inspired me to make Baoncy?

Sometimes if I need a brief distraction from whatever it is that I’m doing, I’ll play games like Snake Game, Pac-man, Tetris or even Chrome’s Tyrannosaurus game to clear my mind. All of them follow a very simple concept, yet are also really engaging, and some of the old ones from the 80s are still quite popular today. Maybe it’s just me, but I think its fascinating how despite how basic they are, sometimes games don’t necessarily have to follow an overly complicated concept and can sometimes compete with, and even exceed games with far more complex gameplay elements. Even Wordle follows a similar concept, and in many ways, it reminds me of the game hang-man. About a year ago I started to ask myself what it is that makes these kinds of games tick. So, I decided to jump into completely foreign territory and started to try and create my own video game. Along with learning how to actually make a video game, I came up with a pretty simple idea off of the top of my head and thought about how I could expand upon that idea, tested what worked and what didn’t, all the while making sure not to deviate from my original intent, that being to create something that wouldn’t look out of place in an 80s arcade, as 8-bit arcade games were my primary inspiration above all else. The result? Baoncy, a top-down 8-bit game where you play as character named Baoncy the Bao Dumpling (like bouncy, but you replace the “ou” with “ao” to sound like the dumpling).

The objective of Baoncy is simple, Baoncy is place on a map filled with Dumplings and a life raft all floating on dumpling soup. Baoncy’s objective is to reach the life raft, but first you have to jump on all of the dumplings on the map, triggering them to start sinking. The dumplings will sink faster the more levels you beat (but there is a maximum speed limit). If you step on the life raft before you’ve stepped on all the dumplings, the raft will pop and its game over. The same applies if you stand on a sinking dumpling for too long, or if you step over into the soup. The faster you reach the life raft, the more points you’ll get, and the minimum amount of time for the maximum amount of points being at the bottom right of your screen. You can gain more points by collecting carrots which will appear at specific locations for three seconds before despawning.

There are sixteen base levels, each with its own layout, and a total of four phases of difficulty. Each of the sixteen levels appears in each phase, but during the latter three phases, the player will encounter variations of the levels that they encountered during level one that look similar but differ slightly. The fourth phase is endless, and features more randomization in which level comes after the other. Baoncy also moves faster with each phase. When you die, you have the option to either retry, or, if you want to share your results, you can add them to the leaderboard, and see how well you did compared to everyone else, and perhaps you’ll even get the highscore!

Ultimately Baoncy is a simple, endless, yet engaging arcade styled puzzle and time-based game with a simple style that encourages players to try and outdo other players (including themselves) while also requiring that players constantly stay on their toes, which only ends when you lose.

Is Baoncy finished?

Right now, I feel very satisfied with Baoncy, and my two beta testers (my older siblings) thought that it was addicting. I want the game to eventually be available on the App Store (and I’ve even added touch-based controls for IOS devices) but I want to make sure people are satisfied with the desktop version before moving further along.