Hello! It’s been a couple months since the last newsletter update, in part because I spent too much time working on the game itself and in part because some medical issues were stopping me from getting enough sleep, so I didn’t have much energy to do other things. Thankfully I’m doing better now, and I’ve got a lot to share!

Help I got carried away and added a battle mode

Hyper Bun Buster already has local and online co-op (with rollback netcode!), but I thought I’d take it one step further and add a PvP battle mode.

It’s like Twinkle Star Sprites or an arcade puzzle game, in the sense that each player has their own playfield and has to survive endless waves of enemies as long as possible. Performing combos by hitting enemies into other enemies will send garbage blocks to your opponent’s field, blocking their movement:

If you want to set up even bigger combos, reducing every enemy on your playfield to a single point of health will cause the next wave of enemies to spawn.

I hope this mode is fun! I decided to give it a shot a the start of July, then I hyperfocused on it for the entire month and emerged at the end holding this thing. I don’t know if this was necessarily the best way to spend a month, but I’m glad I made this thing. Besides, I’d like to start including versus modes in more of my games in the future, so I should give myself as much practice as I can get.

Finishing the actual game

After snapping out of my battle mode trance, I got back to work on the game’s main arcade mode.

First off, I did a final pass on the factory stage to bring it up to the quality of the rest of the game. The claw machine rooms are pretty much unchanged, but the spinning flamethrower rooms have been redesigned to encourage you to move around the room instead of just camp out in a safe spot behind a wall. There are more opportunities to quickly zip around rooms on conveyor belts too:

I also spiced up the boss’ attacks, to make it feel more like an actual boss fight instead of just a scaled-up regular enemy:

This is one of my favourite stages in the whole game now! I was really worried that the spinning flamethrowers, conveyor belts and claw machines would just feel like a series of disconnected gimmicks, but I feel like it came together in the end.

Getting over my fear of stage 1

I’ve been meaning to rebuild the game’s opening stage for a long time. It’s functional and everything but its rooms are all a bit boxy and plain, and the fights were all pretty straightforward too. If you were to try to describe a playthrough of the old stage 1 to someone else, I have a suspicion it would sound something like “I went into a rectangular room full of enemies and I fought them, and then some more enemies spawned in random places around the room and I fought them too, and then I walked into another rectangular room and did the same thing”.

I would have tried to fix this earlier, but I was scared of messing it up. This stage is the very first thing people play, and I really didn’t want to ruin their first impression of the game.

But I had to do it eventually, so I gave it a shot this week. Here’s how it looks now:

It’s still very short (by design) but there’s more of a story arc to it now, especially in the second room. I might tweak it a little in the coming weeks but I’m pretty happy with it already!

Finishing all the other little things

I’ve been chipping away at all the other small things that need doing, like challenge mode and achievements.

Challenge mode has a fancy new menu:

There’s not really much to say about achievements, other than that I finally got around to learning ImageMagick to automate the process of adding backgrounds and borders to achievement icons and exporting them in all of the sizes and formats that Steam wants them in. Speaking of which, here’s my favourite achievement icon:

Is the game almost done?

I’ve been working on Hyper Bun Buster for a long time but the end is just about in sight. Once I’ve improved the final stage, made the final boss and made some improvements to the mice stage (including its boss), arcade mode will be fully playable!

After that, I just need to draw some of the bosses, make the rest of the music and sound effects, balance co-op multiplayer, make a few more menus and maybe add replays to the online leaderboards if I have the time. You could argue that the word “just” is doing some heavy lifting there, but I feel pretty good about my current progress!

Looking at this list, I’m frankly not sure whether or not I’ll be able to finish the game by the end of the year. I’ll do my best though.

Anything else?

I've been thumbing through a lot of old Gamest magazine issues! It's a Japanese arcade arcade game that ran from the mid 80s until the late 90s. It's fascinating to read articles from when some of my favourite arcade games were new, such as Final Fight and Ghouls 'n Ghosts, and to see what the previews and tips/strategies were like back then. It serves as a nice reminder that there plenty of people have loved those arcade games and taken their gameplay seriously for a long time, and it's not just a modern online phenomenon.

Jermanator made a video about the old arcade beat 'em up Captain Commando, featuring lots of interview clips with me and Boghog. If you want to hear me ramble about Cadillacs & Dinosaurs while someone else rambles about Captain Commando, now you can!

I keep thinking about this miniboss in Shinobi Legions (Sega Saturn). How delightful.

npckc wrote a blog post about making the 'nonbinary coded games' event on Steam with my friend Nami! If you're a game developer or simply curious about how Steam events/sales get set up, it's very educational! I'd love to set up something like this after I've made Hyper Bun Buster, if I can find enough other devs releasing arcade-style games.

LURRUNA is out now on Steam and itch.io! It plays like a mixture of Ghouls 'n Ghosts and a classic Castlevania game, and it's easily up there with Caramel Action Micro as one of my favourite new games of 2026. I already loved the demo and I was shocked to discover that the level designs have been improved even further in the final release! I haven't finished the game yet so my opinions could change, but it's incredible so far.

Last but not least, I love this scoring playthrough of the Hyper Bun Buster demo by a really pleasant person! It has commentary in the subtitles, so you can read about the game’s scoring system as you play:

That’s all I’ve been up to recently. I don’t plan on going another two months before sending the next newsletter update, so hopefully I’ll have some new levels or bosses to show off soon. I hope you enjoy the rest of your August and I’ll see you next time!