Chessplosion is 50% off for Steam Friendship Games Week 2023! And more gamedev news!
Chessplosion is 50% off for Steam Friendship Games Week 2023!
You can save 50% on Chessplosion for the next 6 days on Steam and itch.io as part of the Friendship Games Week event on Steam. This is an event celebrating games with local multiplayer, although Chessplosion also supports online multiplayer for 2-4 players with rollback netcode if that's more your kind of thing. If you know anyone else who would be interested in Chessplosion's multiplayer, now is the time for them to pick it up. Thanks for your support!
I'm still working on my next game too!
Since sending the last newsletter, I've mostly just been working on music for my next game. I haven't made much progress, but I'm slowly getting back into the swing of things.
The other thing I did recently was replaying Kuru Kuru Kururin for the Game Boy Advance after seeing that it was added to the Nintendo Switch Online service. It's one of my favorite games about a duck flying a helicopter, and going through its difficult endgame stages for the first time in over a decade was a fun experience. It helped me understand how I wanted my new game's difficulty curve to feel, so I made a couple of balance changes:
Special delivery stages (the linear stages where you have to carry a single package from the start to the end) now give you 2 hitpoints instead of 3. I had been thinking about this change for a while, because it felt like you could fudge your way through a stage and make a ton of mistakes and still make it to the end. But the main thing stopping me from making the change was that I remembered Kuru Kuru Kururin was a challenging game despite giving you 3 hitpoints. But now that I went back and replayed Kuru Kuru Kururin, I remembered that getting hit once in that game often results in immediately getting hit a second or third time, so its 3 hitpoints are really more like 2 hitpoints in practice.
This lower health limit feels good for now, but I can always change it back later if ends up feeling too harsh. And if anyone gets stuck and just wants to get to the next part of the game, the assist mode lets you give yourself extra health, or slow down the game, or completely skip the stage.
My other change was to make the B rank time trial times much easier. When delivering flyers or playing a special delivery stage, you get a rank at the end depending on your final time: C rank, B rank, A rank, and maybe even an S rank if you're fast enough. Kuru Kuru Kururin also has four tiers of times, balanced as follows:
- S rank: very fast, requires mastering the stage
- A rank: pretty fast, taking a few shortcuts
- B rank: decently fast casual run
- C rank: slow
This felt pretty good in practice! Even if you're not trying to get the absolute fastest speed in Kuru Kuru Kururin, you'll still find yourself accidentally getting some B ranks along the way. Whereas in my game, the B rank times weren't much slower than the A rank times, so anyone who wasn't trying to put real effort into maxing out their speed would end up with C ranks across the board. Now that I've made the B rank times a bit slower, it feels a bit easier to get started with the game's time trials. And just as a reminder, these time trials are an optional challenge in the first place. So if you'd rather just play through the game without worrying about any of this, please do!
That's all I've got for you in this extra newsletter. Once again, you can save 50% on Chessplosion on Steam and itch.io this week, and I'll see you on Thursday with a full size newsletter!