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September 26, 2025

Hyper Bun Buster SAGE demo feedback and next steps

Hello! After rushing to release Hyper Bun Buster's SAGE demo and Steam store page last Friday, everything has slowed down a bit. I've had some time to watch everyone try out the game, take in their feedback and decide where to go from here. Here's how it all went.

SAGE demo impressions

When I put the SAGE demo out there into the world, I had no idea what people would think of it. I've been blown away by the positive reaction! Everyone seems to like it, Normal mode is roughly as difficult as I wanted it to be, Hard mode seems to also be in a fairly good place, Easy mode appears to be a good fit for the players who I designed it for, and I even saw a few people play through the game on Very Hard mode.

I was unsure if other arcade game sickos (like myself) would be interested in a game that doesn't neatly fall into an existing arcade genre, but the ones who I saw play the game seemed to instantly get it. Console game players seemed to like the game too, and they did a great job of sticking with it despite its arcade structure.

A pink bunny girl hitting a fire mage with a hammer, causing stars to fly everywhere

On that note, I'm so glad I gave the game infinite continues that send you back to the start of the stage. It would be great if all non-arcade game players would suddenly gain a taste for game overs and clearing a whole game with no continues, but I think it would be hard to convince them to attempt that sort of thing unless they're already very invested in the game. Then again, if I went too far in the opposite direction and added on-the-spot continues I'm pretty sure most players would have just credit fed their way through the game and called it a day. Maybe one day I'll be brave enough to release a game that only has a no-continues arcade mode and a practice mode, but for now I think forcing people to clear individual stages without dying more than once is a good compromise that helps motivate console game players to engage with an arcade-style game.

On the other hand, a few of the console game players who tried the game would have been happier if its levels contained more baked-in tutorialization that catered to a first-time playthrough, at the expense of making subsequent playthroughs of those levels more boring. I don't want to compromise my arcade mode's replayability in that way, but I think those players will have a much better time playing adventure mode when I’ve made it.

SAGE demo streams

Here are a few of the streams that featured the Hyper Bun Buster demo, if you want to give them a watch:

  • SkylordZoey - Normal mode and a few Very Hard stages, featuring me as a guest

  • itsLilyBat - Normal mode and a Very Hard mode boss, with me in chat

  • PennyCentsless - Normal mode, with me in chat

  • HikanowaGuild - Normal mode

  • HikanowaGuild again - Very Hard mode, with me in chat

  • Ginpu - Easy mode

  • CodeChannel - Normal mode and a few Very Hard stages, with me in chat

  • SpaceyBat_ - Normal mode

Thank you so much to everyone who streamed or played my game!

Post-launch demo changes

I released a couple of updates to the SAGE demo after it launched, to fix various issues I noticed while watching people play through it on stream:

  • Bug fix: the "Stage Clear!" fanfare no longer plays on Game Over (oops)

  • Bug fix: your chain is now cleared on death, not just on non-lethal damage

  • Bug fix: chicken bombs launched by players no longer disappear when clearing a room

  • Bug fix: fixed a softlock in room 2-3

  • The last few surviving chickens in room 2-3 will no longer run away to corners where you can't hit them

  • Chickens now throw bombs higher (64->80 pixels), to make it a bit easier to see where they're going to land

  • Time limit changed to 60 seconds on all difficulty modes (was 99 seconds on easy/normal and 50 seconds on very hard). Easy/normal timers now tick down slower than before.

  • S/S+ rank score thresholds adjusted to take the new time limits into account

  • You now lose a life when you run out of time, instead of just taking 1 heart of damage

  • The final treasure chest in stage 3 now contains a heart instead of a carrot

  • Final boss now attacks faster on Normal difficulty, and detonates more rocks at once (7->9)

What’s next?

There are lots of other things that I'd like to work on next, to make the game even better. In short: I want to rework the blue mice so you don’t have to spend such a long time waiting around for their invincibility to end, I want to make more interesting and unique combat setpieces, I want to encourage people to go back and replay stages to try and clear them without any deaths and I want to make the scoring system more interesting.

Specifically, the chain timer in this game is very lenient, in part because I wanted it to be possible to chain an entire stage, even if you got unlucky with some enemies’ movements or had to wait around a couple of seconds for blue mice to lose their invulnerability. However, after playing through the game several times with the current scoring system, playing for score basically boils down to just playing the game fairly quickly without taking too much damage. I think I’m instead going to try making the scoring system reward specific actions (e.g. grouping up lots of enemies and taking them all out in one hit) to force you to try and play differently, as opposed to the current low-friction scoring system that mostly just aims to minimizes the amount of frustration caused by RNG. Making a game non-frustrating can be useful, but making it fun is even more important.

Anything else?

I made a Bluesky account, although I don't plan on using it for anything other than occasionally reposting big news about my games (e.g. announcement, release date announcement, release).

There are lots of other free demos and fangames at SAGE too! There are interesting takes on the classic Sonic formula like Sonic Can Only Go Up (video), Untitled Sonic Fangame (video) and Super Duper Amy Freaking Rose (video), and there are lots of other cute-looking indie games like Rog & Roll (video) and Snoutbreakers (video). Go take a look around SAGE and try out some demos!

That’s all I’ve been up to recently. I unfortunately worked far too much in the weeks leading up to SAGE so I’m going to go take a few days off and get some rest. I hope you have a restful couple of weeks and I'll see you next time!

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