Hello! Now that Hyper Bun Buster’s arcade mode can be played from start to finish, I spent the last two weeks playtesting it and fixing all of the small issues that weren’t as apparent back when I was only playing one stage at a time.

Making arcade mode shorter

Hyper Bun Buster's arcade mode is long. Too long. The game is pretty intense and difficult, so I would ideally like arcade mode to take somewhere around 25-35 minutes to play a full run from start to finish if you're playing quickly. This is just about in line with shmups and other similarly intense arcade genres, and it means that players won't be forced to play near-perfectly for a super long session.

However, the game has 13 stages; far more than I could cram into 35 minutes of gameplay without being so aggressive about cutting their length that the game would practically turn into a boss rush. So for the past couple of months, I've been thinking about the different ways I could split the game into different routes. That way players won't have to play all 13 stages in a single run. Last week was the time for me to make an actual decision.

I considered the different styles of routes that people use, such as wide branching trees like Outrun or Darius, narrower branching paths (e.g. choosing stage 3A or 3B then stage 4A or 4B), converting some stages into optional extra stages like in Deathsmiles, or splitting up the game into multiple discrete campaigns. The more I thought about this, the more I realized that I don't particularly like routes in arcade games for the most part. They're fine in games like Outrun where they're basically just different racetracks to race on, but for standard survival-focused arcade action games that have one big main campaign with one big main final boss at the end, I'd rather make everyone play the same game for the most part. It would feel weird if someone cleared Hyper Bun Buster without ever learning how to play the fire stage or the frog stage, for example.

(As an aside, the one thing I do like about routes is that they let you add more variety to the early parts of the game, making repeated run attempts feel less repetitive. My favorite implementation of this is to just mix up the order of the game's early stages for each run, whether it's a random order like various Psikyo arcade shmups or a player-chosen order like Mega Man and various other 80s/90s console games. You still have to play all of the stages, but if you're still learning the game and you keep getting sent back to the start you won't have to sit through the exact same stage 1 every single time. I currently don't plan on doing this for Hyper Bun Buster though, as I like the current order of the game's early stages and they weren't designed with this kind of shuffling in mind)

I tried coming up with a way of splitting the game into routes that I didn't hate. Maybe there were a few stages that I didn't mind being on optional routes, even if I wanted most of the game to be mandatory? I drew up a ton of different ideas for routes, but they all ended up being different forms of the same thing: I didn't really mind if people skipped the spikes stage, the hot pepper stage or the factory stage, but I wanted them to play everything else.

I wanted to see how these different routes would look in action, so I started by modifying arcade mode to include all 13 stages and recording myself clearing it on very hard mode. It took me roughly 41 minutes to clear the game, plus another ~4 minutes for the final boss that I haven't made yet. The hot pepper stage doesn't have a boss yet either, but I spent an extra minute milking the fire stage's boss for score so that evens out. So it would take me about 45 minutes to clear the game when I'm playing quickly, and I'd really like to drop that time down to 35 minutes or less.

With the video recorded and ready to use, I started chopping it up and moving bits around:

The more I tried excluding different stages from the to simulate different routes, the more I kept being confronted by the same issue: I didn't like the spikes stage, the hot pepper stage, the mole stage (other than the boss fight) or the factory stage as much as I like the other arcade mode stages. It felt like each of those stages had their own issues: I don't think that the spike hazards are as dynamic or replayable as the game's other stage gimmicks, I think hot peppers are extremely strong and there's not a whole stage's worth of interesting level design gimmicks for them (and the stage has no boss yet), I think the non-boss fights in the mole stage are too repetitive and it's too annoying when the moles teleport really far away from you, and I think the visibility on the factory stage is bad.

These four problems require four solutions:

I removed the spike stage from arcade mode. I'll still include it as a playable stage on the challenge mode menu and the spike dungeon will still exist in adventure mode, but it won't be a part of a standard arcade mode run.

I'm making hot peppers a room gimmick instead of a stage gimmick. I removed the hot pepper stage from arcade mode entirely and I used some of its individual hot pepper rooms in other stages as a way to break up the flow. Its remaining unused rooms will be used in adventure mode and/or challenge mode instead. I think its jungle tileset would be a good fit for parts of the adventure mode overworld! Because it would just be part of the overworld instead of its own dungeon, this means I won't have to force myself to make a ton of filler hot pepper rooms or a hot pepper boss just for adventure mode.

I made the mole stage shorter by removing the rooms that aren't quite as replayable or interesting as the rest: the room where you jump back and forth between platforms, and the big room full of moles and boars. I also reworked the corridor near the start of the stage to use the best ideas from the hot pepper stage's cat corridor, and I slightly reduced the maximum distance away from the player that the moles can teleport so they don’t end up in unreachable spots as often.

And finally, I improved the factory stage's visibility a bit. My main problem was that the bright green slime showed through the grated metal floor too much, so I made the floor thicker:

All these ideas lead me to an obvious question. If I was going to cut the spike stage and the hot pepper stage from arcade mode and I was going to make the mole stage shorter, were there any other stages that I also wanted to make shorter? If so, could I get arcade mode down to a reasonable length without any branching routes at all?

So I did it! First by chopping up the stages in the video, and then by implementing those changes in the game. The game now takes me 30 minutes to play through (~34 minutes if we add on some extra time for the final boss that I haven’t made yet), which is exactly how long I wanted it to take. It felt great too!

Fixing more arcade mode issues

Now that I can play arcade mode from start to finish in a reasonable length of time and it feels a bit closer to being finished, I finally got around to fixing lots of the smaller issues that I’d been putting off until then.

ou now only get awarded a single bomb after each stage in a full run of arcade mode, instead of your bomb stock automatically filling back up to 2. This sounds like a small difference, but knowing that blowing through your entire bomb stock will cause you to start the next stage with only 1 bomb instead of 2 gives you a reason to actually try and hold onto them. Bombs now feel like an actual game-long resource to keep track of, like they were always supposed to.

The frog stage now has an extra health pickup so it's not way harder than the rest of the game (although it's still comfortably the hardest stage in my opinion), and the frog boss will now always use its melee attack when it's in melee range. Previously it would sometimes decide to try and bait you to even closer instead, which was extremely hard to deal with and wasn't really in line with how anything else in the game worked. If I eventually decide that the frog boss' current form is too easy, I'd rather just increase its movement speed or attack rate instead.

The second room of the fire stage has been changed from the old fire chicken room to a condensed version of the room in the now-cut hot pepper stage where fire chicken eggs spring out of the lava. This was a tough decision for me to make; I really liked the old room but I like the new one even more. I imagine the adventure mode fire dungeon will have both of those rooms.

If you land on an enemy's head after bouncing off a jump pad, that enemy now gets pushed one tile away from you. Previously they would just awkwardly overlap with you, forcing you to step to a different tile if you wanted to hit them.

There were some straight-up bugs that I fixed too. Enemy bombs that bounce off a jump pad and land on the player's head will now explode as usual; defeating a boss while they're charging up an attack will no loner cause their attack telegraph VFX to render over the boss KO silhouette; and pushing the last enemy in a stage into the water will now award the correct score multiplier (previously it was clearing the chain value before the enemy finished falling in the water, because the chaining system is disabled during boss fights).

I’m very happy with these changes! I’d still like to adjust a few of the setpieces in the factory stage and I still need to make the final boss, but everything else is great.

Anything else?

A friend bullied me into posting Hyper Bun Buster's footsies frog boss on Bluesky. I'm really not a fan of social media, but maybe I can just about handle occasionally logging in, posting a silly gameplay clip that makes me laugh, then logging out again.

Boghog released his free game Caramel Action Micro! It's a cross between a maze game and a top-down run n gun, and it's deceptively difficult despite its cute exterior. I love it so far and I want to play more of it!

I love mzn's silly, playful character designs, and high speed house is no exception. Please look at it.

The first chapter of Verti's manga/webcomic Go! Go! Gris! is adorable! I love when webcomics have their own cute custom websites.

That's all I've been up to recently. I hope you see something cute in the next couple of weeks and I'll see you next time!