Hello! I spent these last two weeks stacking cats on top of each other and chipping away at various behind-the-scenes coding tasks that I’ve been putting off for years.

Cat stack

One of Hyper Bun Buster’s late-game bosses is going to ride on top of a stack of cat enemies, with other enemies attacking from conveyor belts on the side of the stage. Something like this:

I tried to program the stack of cats back in 2024, ran into some issues getting working, and I’ve been putting it off ever since. I finally ran out of other bosses to work on last week so I couldn’t put it off any longer, and this time I got it to work:

I love these cats ! They’re so silly.

As much as I would love to finish making this boss fight and be completely done with the game’s bosses (other than animation/artwork), I had spent so long working on boss fights that I was desperate for a break. So I took the opportunity to do some small housekeeping tasks to improve the game.

Localization spreadsheets

Although I haven't officially hired anyone to translate Hyper Bun Buster into other languages yet, it’s likely that I’ll do it once the game's text is locked down. Both Chessplosion and Ducky's Delivery Service released in several languages on launch and I'd like to keep doing that with my future games, so as many people as possible get to play them.

Unfortunately lots of Hyper Bun Buster's text was hardcoded into the game, with the assumption that I would eventually hook it all up to an external spreadsheet that can be used by translators. Last Friday I finally got around to doing this!

Practice mode improvements

One of the things I loved about playing Caramel Action Micro (spoiler for the "Anything else?" section later in this post) is its practice mode. Whenever you die or clear the stage that you're practicing, it automatically restarts the stage without you having to press anything. The background music keeps playing too, so you can really get into the practice zone and learn a stage without having to hit the restart button every ten seconds.

So I made Hyper Bun Buster's practice mode work this way too! I also gave it a toggle for whether you want to practice a single room or play out the rest of the stage. This lets you do things like trying to get consistent at clearing a difficult room without taking any hits or using any bombs, without having to open the pause menu and hit the restart button after each attempt:

This feature has only been in the game for a week but I love it already. I never want to go back to the old emulator-style experience of having to manually reload the checkpoint after every practice attempt.

Potential new game mode?

A year or two ago I had an idea for a fun extra game mode, and it’s been sitting in the back of my mind ever since. Now that the end of arcade mode is in sight, I decided to start prototyping this new game mode to see if it would be worth making for real. Here’s a sneak peek at how it looks right now in its experimental half-programmed state:

It’s promising so far, although there are still a lot of design questions that remain unanswered. If the rest of the game mode ends up being as fun as I hope it will be I’ll officially add the mode to the game, but for now it’s still just an experiment. I’ll let you know how it’s going next time!

Anything else?

As I mentioned in the practice mode section, I've been playing Boghog's free top-down action game Caramel Action Micro. It's like a combination of Pac-Man, Battle City/Tank Force and a run 'n gun, and I love it! I cleared the first loop of the game and recorded a commentary video, and I highly recommend playing the game yourself too. I love its fast pace, its respawning enemies, its charming art and its huge character sprites.

Writer's Block is a cool looking puzzle game! It's like Puyo Puyo meets Scrabble. I haven't tried it out yet but I want to!

Amalgamate is an interesting puzzle-roguelike about merging things together. I had a great time with it and my high score of 1149 was third place on the leaderboards until everyone overtook me...

I liked this video about Guy Standing's wikipedia page, especially the joke that starts at 15:11. It's so silly...

I subjected a friend to Resident Evil Survivor (PS1) this week, and I still have a real soft spot for that game's control scheme. You play it with the PS1 lightgun which has one button on each side (and no other buttons except for the gun's trigger, so there's no Start button etc), yet they somehow made it work for a full Resident Evil game with free movement. You shoot at the screen to shoot, but you can also freely turn left and right with the two buttons on the side of the gun and walk forward by pointing the gun away from the screen and holding the trigger. Squeezing both side buttons at once opens the menu, which you can navigate with the two side buttons and the trigger. It's not the greatest game ever but I really admire how they made it work on a controller that was absolutely not designed for this sort of thing, and I especially admire that it's a tank controls game that doesn't let you walk backwards. The only way to back off from an enemy is to turn away from them, and that's terrifying.

That's all I've been up to this week. I hope you all have a joy-filled couple of weeks and I’ll see you next time!