RICOCHET
Projectiles bouncing off surfaces — bullets deflecting at angles, bounced arrows reaching cover-hidden targets, banked shots as deliberate technique.
- SOLO-DEV COST MEDIUM
- TIMING REAL-TIME
- COMMON IN PUZZLE · SHOOTER · ACTION · ARPG
Peggle built a candy empire on bounce physics, Wolfenstein and DOOM-lineage games flirt with ricochet weapons, tactical shooters model deflection off hard surfaces at shallow angles (Squad and Arma's ricochets make walls unreliable cover honestly), Marvel's Deadpool-style ricochet perks and Aim Lab curiosities aside, the mechanic's purest game homes are bounce-puzzle designs (Portal's lasers, countless mobile games) and Vampire Survivors-adjacent builds where bouncing projectiles multiply damage economy. Designers add ricochet because it bends the shooter's fundamental line: a straight-line projectile makes cover binary and sightlines absolute, but a bouncing one converts geometry into an attack surface — corners stop protecting, banked shots reward spatial imagination, and level architecture becomes ammunition. In puzzle framing, ricochet is the angle-of-incidence lesson turned toy: players predict reflections, and the satisfaction of a three-bounce solution is geometry vindicated. As a build modifier, bounce-count stacking turns crowded rooms into pinball damage machines — the ARPG's cheapest route to screen-filling spectacle. Key decisions: deterministic versus physics-fuzzy bounces (puzzles demand perfect mirror reflection; milsim wants probabilistic deflection by angle and material — the two philosophies serve opposite masters), bounce-count and damage-decay budgets, and prediction assistance — trajectory previews make banking learnable, their absence makes it expert-only. Pitfall: ricochet that hurts its shooter unpredictably — a bounced bullet returning to kill the player who fired it is comedy once and rage forever after; friendly-ricochet rules need either full predictability (so it's your fault, legibly) or self-immunity, because randomness in a mechanic about angles reads as the geometry itself betraying you.