Making my arcade stages feel more arcade-like
Hello! Now that I’m happy with Hyper Bun Buster’s scoring system and I’ve figured out how I want its arcade combat encounters to feel, I’ve started doing one last quality pass on all of its arcade mode stages.
Here are the upgraded versions of four of these stages (without the boss fights, which haven’t been changed yet):
I’ll go through all of the changes I made to the mouse stage to give you an idea of what I’ve been doing, along with a few highlights from the other stages.
Mouse stage changes
The first room in the mouse stage has a similar layout to the old one, but the cats now jump in from the top of the screen and immediately attack you. Balancing this room made me realise just how difficult it can be to spot new enemies entering the room in general, so there's now a warning on the floor that shows you where they're appearing. The second room is pretty much the same as the old one too, but enemies now jump out of the water and appear out of mouseholes.
The third, fourth and fifth rooms in the new stage are the new arcade-style setpieces that I built shortly after the game's SAGE demo, and I'm glad I could fit them all into arcade mode. And finally, the last room is like the old stage's fifth room but with mice jumping in from the sides of the room and chasing you around.
In short, it's about a 50:50 mix of new arcade setpieces that I made after getting feedback on the SAGE demo, and old rooms with new handcrafted enemy waves. I like it!
Other stage changes
The other stages follow the same formula as the mouse stage, consisting of a mixture of brand new rooms and improved older rooms.
My favorite new room is one in the penguin stage that makes you fight your way along a thin winding path, while hiding behind walls and dodging bombs thrown by a lone chicken (2:54 in the video). It's surprising how much more chaotic and organic the game feels just from having lots of different enemy types on screen at once, so I’d like to start doing that more. I also love how you just fight your way from one end of the room to the other and move on, instead of every single room having to be a standalone combat arena with multiple waves of enemies.
My other favorites are the penguin ambush (3:10 in the video), the modified adventure mode mole room (4:13) that uses the spring shoes powerup and the modified adventure mode jump pad jumpscare (6:45).
After all of these changes, the only two rooms that still have random enemy spawn locations are the penguin rush (2:18) and the jump pad corridor of hell (7:15). I tried lots of different fixed spawning methods for both of these rooms, but the old behavior of simply spawning enemies in random places that are far away from the player was exactly what they needed.
I’ve been making changes to other stages too, including some that required programming new features and adjusting enemy behaviors, but they’re not quite ready yet. I’ll have plenty more to show next time!
Anything else?
I've been playing Ninja Saviors: Return of the Warriors, the modern remake of The Ninja Warriors for the SNES. It's really pretty! I managed to clear the game without dying on hard mode on my stream and although the easy early stages, lack of game-long resources to manage and lack of a practice mode were starting to bug me by the end, the game's mechanics themselves are fantastic. I can't wait to try the SNES version of the game, which apparently has more aggressive enemies and tighter arenas (due to it not being widescreen). I'll see how it goes!
I've still been playing lots of Rolling Bird too, and I still love it. I haven't managed to clear two loops of it without dying yet but I'm getting close!
Speaking of Rolling bird, SpidersSTG made a long video about the Shinobi series and the "spy run 'n gun" subgenre that Rolling Thunder, Rolling Bird and the Shinobi arcade games belong to. It's very rambly and meandering but I really enjoyed it, and maybe you will too.
That's all I've been up to this week. I'm going to go play some more Rolling Bird and get some rest. I hope you have an couple of weeks and I'll see you next time!