Hello! I spent the last month improving Hyper Bun Buster’s web demo and adding new setpieces, challenge rooms, achievements and leaderboards to the full game.

Demo improvements

Thank you so much for playing the demo of Hyper Bun Buster! It was great to see so many kind comments and so much constructive feedback.

I released several updates to the demo in the week following the initial release. You can see the full patch notes in the devlog posts on the demo page, but the main changes were making the controls feel much better for people who tap each individual step instead of holding directions, speeding up the transition between rooms and making the coins very slightly less visually intrusive (it’s a start…).

The vast majority of the feedback I received on the demo was positive, and hopefully it feels even better now.

Floor breaking setpieces

I really wanted to add some visually exciting setpieces to take you from one room to the next in certain parts of arcade mode, to spice things up a bit. I also wanted to add rooms to the game that were an odd-sized number of tiles wide and tall, such as this 11×9 tile waffle-shaped room:

The problem was that I couldn’t decide on a visually pleasing place to add the 4-tile-wide doors that take you to and from such a room, or how to adjust the camera position when moving to this room from one of the game’s usual 16×12 tile rooms without it looking strange.

So I killed two birds with one stone by making a section of the game where the floor breaks underneath you, sending you falling down into a 15×11 tile room. When you clear that room the floor breaks again, taking you back to a normal 16×12 tile room:

It looks smooth, it’s exciting, and it’s a great excuse to include some silly sprite scaling and camera zoom:

New challenge rooms

Hyper Bun Buster is going to include lots of one-off challenge rooms as an extra game mode. Some of them are rooms that didn’t quite fit into arcade mode for one reason or another (such as being too exploitable, not being replayable enough once you know how to clear them, or simply being cut from the game for pacing purposes) and some of them are fun puzzles designed to let you learn or practice specific skills and gameplay mechanics.

Here are a bunch of chicken- and penguin-themed challenge rooms:

The main inspirations for the more puzzle/tutorial-style challenge rooms were Fei's Problems and Statue Caves from the Shiren the Wanderer series of turn-based roguelikes, which are semi-tutorial puzzles that unlock over the course of the game and force you to figure out specific mechanics or interactions. I'm aiming for the action game equivalent of that, and I'm looking forward to making similar challenge rooms themed around the other enemies!

Achievements and leaderboards

I added Steam achievements and online leaderboards to the game. There’s not really much to say about them; you know how achievements and leaderboards work. I’ll try to add some more fun achievements once I’m closer to release and know what’s exactly in the game, and I’d also like to experiment with doing a bit more with the online leaderboards too.

Maybe I could show the leaderboards a bit more prominently in arcade mode’s menus instead of cordoning them off into their own menu, or maybe I could let you download and watch other people’s replays (and save your own replays, for that matter). This is my first time working on a game with online leaderboards though, so I don’t know how hard this will be. No promises yet!

Speaking of things that there’s not much to say about, I also added a boss rush to the game! You know how a boss rush works; you try to defeat all the game’s bosses in a row. Like the other game modes, it has its own online leaderboard.

Anything else?

It’s been a while since I wrote one of these newsletters. I’m the only person working on Hyper Bun Buster and I want to spend a bit more of my time actually making the game, which unfortunately means I have to spend a little less of my time writing. So I might write one of these posts every three or four weeks instead of every two weeks for the time being. That might change if I’ve done something really exciting that I can’t wait to tell you about, of course!

I bought a USB controller that clamps on to the sides of my phone and makes it act like a cheap handheld console, and it somehow lets me play the Hyper Bun Buster web demo! Unfortunately the web demo doesn't know anything about phones or about screen rotation, so it displays sideways on my phone, stopping me from being able to see anything that’s happening on the right side of the screen. I'll have to see if there's a way I can make the web demo support screen rotation...

I cleared the arcade game Cadillacs & Dinosaurs on the hardest difficulty! Here's a commented video of my run, and there's also a commentary-free version and the live stream recording of my playthrough if you're interested. It's interesting to see how Capcom adapted their usual beat em up enemies to let them deal with players who can dash around the screen really quickly. Some of the basic enemies can't keep up with you, but others do a great job of hopping around like the flea men from Castlevania and keeping up with your attempts to escape. Overall it's a fun game!

While digging through the shelves of some online stores that sell physical copies of old Japanese games, I stumbled upon Bomb Meirin. It's a Touhou-themed game inspired by RoboWarrior/Bomber King. The way the game draws people (such as these dolls with bows in their hair) is so simple yet so cute! It makes me want to draw people like that in future games of mine; I think they would look great alongside my games' chunky blob-shaped animals.

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