Chessplosion was the grand finals game at a fighting game tournament! And more dev updates
Hello again! For this week's newsletter, I have some surprise news:
Chessplosion was the grand finals game at the Frosty Faustings Mystery Tournament!
Frosty Faustings was last weekend! If you haven't heard of it, it's an incredibly well-run annual fighting game tournament that takes place in Chicago. I used to travel there from the UK to compete every year until the pandemic hit, and I recommend the event to anyone who is interested in any of the many, many fighting games that are played there.
One of the events they run every year is the mystery tournament, where every single round of the tournament is played on a different game and the players have no idea which games they'll be competing in. I've entered it a couple of times and I've seen everything from unusual fighting games like Weaponlord and Dragon Ball Z V.R.V.S., to non-fighting games like Road Rash and Tricky Towers, to board games like Don't Break The Ice.
The actual tournament happened in the middle of the night in my timezone, but when I woke up the next morning to watch the stream vod, I had a DM in my inbox telling me that the grand finals was played on my game Chessplosion! And sure enough, it was. If you want to see what it looks like when two people try to play Chessplosion for the first time under pressure, go check out the vod!
I still can't believe it happened. Huge thanks to Ryyudo and jmcrofts for the commentary, YipeS for hosting the stream, the mystery tournament organizers for choosing Chessplosion, and everyone else involved in organizing Frosty Faustings.
I'm still working on my next game. Also music is hard
My next game's code, design and art are all finished. So this week I've been doing lots of small things like finishing the last couple of world map sprites, making sure that the Steam version of the game works correctly, and creating icons for all of the achievements:
All of my music creation stuff is finally working on my new PC too, so I've started working on the game's soundtrack. It's still in the very early stages and I'm learning a lot about music production as I go, so it might be a long time before I have anything worth showing. But I'm trying to have fun instead of worrying about getting immediate results, and it feels good to finally get started!
Honestly, I could write a whole newsletter about accidentally stressing myself out by putting too much pressure on myself to create great music for the game, but I'll just ramble about it here instead. When I first talked about the game's music a few months ago, my plan was to try and take it in a blue skies, live-sounding jazz fusion videogame music direction, like modern Sonic games or Daytona USA. After all, I can already play a bit of guitar and I already made Chessplosion's soundtrack, so what else would I even need to learn?
It turns out that the answer to that question is that I would need to learn a lot. Like how to mix jazz fusion piano, drums, sax, trumpet, organ, synths and so on, where to find good samples for all of those instruments, how to actually arrange music for all of those instruments (e.g. how to voice chords for jazz fusion piano so it doesn't get in the way of the bass or the lead melody), and so on. I don't think I'd ever be able to handle learning all of that at once, never mind right now when my game's lack of music is holding up its development and I'm having to deal with lots of stressful transition-related stuff outside of work.
So my current plan for music is to take the setup I was using for Chessplosion's music and to try to push it in a bit of a jazzier direction, by adding one or two extra instruments and possibly finding some more live-sounding drums to work with. I'm feeling good about this for now, but if it still ends up being too much for me, I can always use royalty-free music or work with a musician. We'll see how it goes!
Anyway, that's my week! I still can't believe Chessplosion was the grand finals of Frosty Faustings' mystery tournament, and I'm finally starting to get over my music worries. I haven't played any new games recently but the Steam Next Fest is running until Monday morning, so I might go and try out some new demos this weekend. I loved Rusted Moss when I played an earlier demo of it, but let me know if there's anything else that you recommend!