New arcade stages, breaking the mole speed ceiling, and cohost
Hello! My emotions have been all over the place these last two weeks. I got so carried away making new stages for my game’s arcade mode a couple of weeks ago that I worked on them all through Saturday and had to take Monday off to make up for it, then I spent all of last weekend having a wonderfully gay time and feeling great about myself, and then Cohost announced on Monday that it’s shutting down at the end of the month.
But I'm getting ahead of myself, and I need to end this intro here before I start uncontrollably typing a giant wall of text about what Cohost meant for me and how I feel about the internet.
New arcade stages
My game’s arcade mode has a ton of new stages! There's a mouse-themed stage that uses the newly redesigned red mice, a conveyor belt stage, a basic stage full of cats and chickens (based on stage 2 of the old playable prototype), a stage with spikes everywhere and an ice stage.
Check them out here (in Very Hard mode):
I didn’t have to make as many changes to enemies or the combat system as I expected. The slime enemies are now faster and more threatening so they can be reused throughout the game instead of being limited to the earlier stages, chickens are a bit slower at running away from the player than they used to be, and the mini mice in the mouse boss fight can now be used anywhere in a level instead of only functioning inside the boss arena:
With that, all of the bosses that I created over the last few months now have a matching arcade stage! They might end up getting adjusted or shuffled around a bit but I’m happy with them for now.
Breaking the mole speed ceiling
I wanted to make a mole-themed stage next but I was running into a serious problem with the moles. They were too easy, but unlike every other enemy in the game I couldn’t figure out a good way to make them more difficult.
This is because their design has a built-in speed ceiling; they pop out of the ground, throw a projectile at you, wait long enough that you have enough time to run up to them and hit them, then hide back underground and repeat the process somewhere else. That long waiting period meant that the moles weren’t firing enough projectiles to be much of a theat, but if I made the waiting period any shorter they would disappear underground before it was even possible for the player to hit them.
The game is carefully balanced around the player’s movement speed and I don’t want to make them move any faster, so I would have to fix this problem by changing the moles themselves. I tried all sorts of options, from making them throw several projectiles at once to giving them the ability to temporarily transform the player into an animal and stopping them from being able to attack:
In the end, the simplest solution was the most enjoyable to play: moles now appear much closer to the player than they used to, so they can quickly hide back underground without being impossible to hit. As a bonus, their shorter attack range now makes them feel meaningfully different to the games’ other ranged enemies.
With that done, I made a mole-themed arcade stage (with no boss yet):
Cohost is shutting down
Cohost, the only social media site that I don't hate, is shutting down at the end of the month. To say that I'm upset about this is an understatement; I found out about cohost at a time when I had just figured out that I was trans and was struggling to be myself and open up to others, and it offered me a place where I felt safe to express myself and chat with a bunch of incredibly kind and creative people. It showed me what the internet could be like in a better world, and I'm going to miss it dearly.
There's nowhere else on the internet right now that can capture everything I love about cohost, but I'm going to make the most of what we have. To start, I moved all of the posts I made on cohost over to my blog. So if you want to read about things like my 1 year HRT anniversary again, they'll be on my blog instead of disappearing into the digital aether. More importantly, if I want to make any more public posts about personal things in the future I'll just put them straight onto my blog too. My era of trying to act like a professional game company on the internet is over; I'm just going to be myself.
The next step is to make my personal website look nice, like the games page that already exists on there. I don't know enough about web programming or static site generation to be able to make the whole site look like that that yet, but I'll give it a try whenever I'm in the mood for it. This might not happen for a while but we'll see! I'll try to carry on the spirit of expressing myself and being creative on my game development streams too, of course!
Anything else?
I finished playing Sol Divide! It's an interesting halfway point between an arcade shooting game and a beat em up and I'd love to try making a game like it one day! I talked about it here on my blog or you can just see the video of me clearing the game here.
SAGE 2024 is live! It’s one of my favorite videogame events of the year, so go play some games or watch the trailer.
Other than that, I've mostly just been looking at cohost a lot. You might like this thread on jungle music, SunshineMoon's post on the history of bunny girls in Japan, Lily Valeen's art, peteena: the poodle in a bikini, boghog's ridiculously large collection of game design posts (archived here), the COMPOST music-making event, or Geemer the cat. I certainly do.
That’s all I’ve been up to recently. I’m going to spend the next couple of weeks finishing up the rest of the game’s arcade mode stages, playing through the game from start to finish, and fixing any glaring full-game balance issues before I make a build for patrons. I hope you have a great couple of weeks and I hope you enjoy cohost while it’s still around. Maybe I’ll even see you in COMPOST #6 this weekend. See you next time!