Angry Boss Boars, huge fireballs and a Chessplosion update
Hello and happy pride month! My boss-making spree continues.
Angry Boss Boars
I finished a couple of boar-themed bosses! The first is the one I talked about in the previous newsletter, which fills the arena with rocks and makes them explode:
I love its big tile-filling fireballs! They’re a bit messy to look at and they could do with a bit of a trail so it’s easy to see which way they’re moving at a glance, but I think these big chunky fireball sprites are a good start.
The second boss boar is all about spikes. It tries to stomp on you, permanently leaving Chessplosion-style spikes where it lands:
It’s using the old Chessplosion spike sprites at the moment and you’re fighting it in a field, so it looks very strange. I can fix that later. But visuals aside, I love it! I wanted to try and make a boss that only had one or two attacks and was still interesting to fight against, and I think I managed it here. Even though the only thing it can do is stomp, it mixes up its targeting between trying to stomp near your current position and looking which way you’re moving and trying to stomp in that direction instead, making it surprisingly hard to avoid, especially when you’re having to constantly keep moving so you don’t get hit by spikes.
A Chessplosion update!
I released a small update to Chessplosion this week. It contains one small change: the optional in-game speedrun timer now displays an asterisk next to your time if any assist mode features are enabled. Some speedrunners use the assist mode features to test out strategies, but it's easy to accidentally leave them on when going for an actual speedrun. This should make it easier for them to notice when that happens.
Anything else?
My friend PlushMayhem's birthday was a few days ago, so I edited my game's cat enemy to look like her cat!
Please enjoy.
Last week I spontaneously decided to make a Steam curator page, a decade after everyone stopped looking at Steam curators. Fun fact: I'm the only Steam curator in the world to recommend Gun.Smoke! I made the page because I had the urge to post a list of games that I recommend, without feeling pressured to write more than a sentence or two about each of them. But half of my favorite games aren't on Steam, so maybe I should find somewhere else to put these short writeups of games that I like. If you have any suggestions on where I could write that sort of thing, please let me know! You can just reply to this email and it’ll go through to me.
I also wrote up a long rambly post on the throughline of my creative work. You can read it here, but the summary is that I'm obsessed with movement in action games, whether it's the player character's movement, or tracking and manipulating lots of other moving objects. I'm still working on my pixel art and music skills, so I have no idea what my games will look like or sound like a decade from now. But I'm certain that whatever happens, I'll always be making challenging action games about the joy of being a little moving object in a world full of other little moving objects.
And that’s it! I’m going to go get some rest and continue my boss-making spree tomorrow. Have a great couple of weeks and I’ll see you next time!