Explosions and Chessplosion updates!
Explosion sprites
I drew the explosion that happens when an enemy explodes! I was struggling to animate a huge screen-filling explosion sprite, so I drew a smaller one and wrote some code for combining them into patterns. I was really nervous about messing up the look of the explosions in my new game, but I like how they turned out!
Chessplosion port
I have wanted to port Chessplosion to the Nintendo Switch for a long time, but I keep putting it off because porting my online multiplayer to a console sounds extremely difficult. But I can't put it off forever, so I've been giving it a try. I'm still in the very very early stages of doing this, and there's a decent chance that I'll never manage to get it working, but I'll try my best. I'll keep you updated on my progress!
Chessplosion speedruns
Chessplosion was one of the games at the Fast Pace for Headspace 2023 speedrun marathon, and I did developer commentary! If you're interested in watching limga_ssb's speedrun of Chessplosion's Dungeon mode (default difficulty, kings only), you can see it here on the twitch VOD (starting at 6:48:10). I had a lot of fun watching the run and talking about it live!
A new Chessplosion game mode!?
As a side effect of these things, I've been thinking about Chessplosion a lot recently. Earlier this week I stared thinking about which of Chessplosion's single player modes I would personally want to replay over and over again, now that I've played the game so many times that I can easily clear most of the single player content.
I came to the conclusion that my ideal Chessplosion single player mode would be something like a single player arcade game: around 10-30 minutes for a run, with a scoring system that encourages skillful and risky play and has just enough randomness to keep things interesting (but not enough to make or break a run). It would basically just be a short, dense, linear version of Dungeon mode with a scoring system and no shops or upgrades. So I prototyped it!
It's called Gauntlet mode, and it's fun enough that I think I'm going to spend a few more days balancing it. I don't know when I'll be able to release it publicly because I'll need to translate any new text into all of the 9 languages that Chessplosion is available in, but as soon as I finish balancing it I'll make an early access build available to patrons over on my Patreon. I hope other people end up enjoying it as much as I do!
Moving my newsletter
TinyLetter, the service I use to send my newsletter, is shutting down. So starting from the next issue, I'll send the newsletter using another service like Buttondown instead. This will all happen automatically in the background, so you won't have to do anything. But if the formatting of the next newsletter looks slightly different than before, that's why.
And that's everything I've been up to! It feels weird typing a newsletter on a Friday night. I'm exhausted, and I'm going to go get some rest and celebrate my weekend. I hope you have a fantastic weekend too, and I'll see you next time!