Hello! I spent these last two weeks reworking Hyper Bun Buster’s mice boss fight and creating the giant cat of my dreams.

Cool mice

Back when I first made the mice boss fight it looked like this. You fought a group of six mice that behaved like the old pre-rework blue mice enemies, then you dodged some mini mice, then you fought the regular mice again while dodging the mini mice. I didn't hate the overall concept but I wanted to make them feel a bit more boss-like, and possibly integrate the arena with the combat a bit more.

Keeping track of six boss mice and the mini mice at the same time was so difficult that I could barely make the mice do anything before it became overwhelming. So the first decision I made was to drop it down to four mice, two of which have a 3x3 melee attack like red mice and two of which chase you down like the post-rework blue mice. I wanted to upgrade their sprites a bit so they looked like cool special mice, and there's nothing cooler than a cartoon mohawk and sunglasses:

They now spread out more and move faster, so they can do a better job of surrounding you. They also have a ground pound stomp attack, to give them another way to chase you down. This stomp’s attack's animation is pretty silly, but it makes me laugh so I'm keeping it.

I tried placing buttons on the floor that cause the mouse holes at the top of the screen to open and close, but it was way too much to keep track of during gameplay. You already had to pay attention to the movements of four different mice and randomly spawning robot mini mice, and adding anything else on top of that was overkill. So here’s how the fight looks now:

I like it! It’s not the flashiest looking boss fight but I love how it feels to push the mice back and stack them up while they try their best to spread out and surround you.

Giant cat

I’ve been thinking about making a boss that’s just a huge scaled-up pixelated version of an existing enemy sprite for a long time, so I’m finally indulging myself by giving the factory stage a giant cat boss.

I wanted this fight to have a similar feel to Bushwacker from The Punisher or the boomerang boss from Gun.Smoke where the boss itself is weak, with a slow attack animation that is easy to interrupt. But the arena fills with lots of enemies who try their best to distract you, and if they manage to keep you busy long enough for the boss to get some attacks off, all hell breaks loose. I’m pretty happy with how it turned out:

Hyper Bun Buster's physics and combat system were programmed under the assumption that each character and projectile only took up one tile, so it took a surprising amount of work to get this working. But it was worth it!

Fun fact: there wasn't any homing projectile code in Hyper Bun Buster, but there was in the original Ducky's Delivery Service prototype where you flew around an arena dodging bullets and shooting at enemies. So I took that code and polished it up for the cat's orb attack. That code has been sitting around doing nothing for four years so I’m glad it was eventually useful for something!

Now all that’s left is the final boss. I have way too many boss attack ideas that haven’t made it into the game yet, so I’m going to prototype a bunch of them and incorporate my favourites into a coherent climactic fight. I’ll let you know how it goes!

Anything else?

I played a ton of games at a local arcade last weekend. I forgot how fun Let's Go Island was! I wonder if I can get it working on my home lightgun setup...

There's a beautiful-looking Time Bokan shmup for the Sega Saturn and PS1 that I didn't know about until just now. I need to study literally everything about how this game looks. It might be one of my favourite looking games of all time. I used to worry that my squashy bouncy pixel art style would be a bad fit for an arcade-style shmup, but this game has given me the confidence to give it a try sometime.

Today I found out about Super Cooks, a 1989 chef-themed parody of Golvellius. I love the way the player character swings his frying pan to attack!

That’s all I’ve been up to recently. I hope you have a wonderful couple of weeks and I’ll see you next time!