Hello! I’ve been on a couple of short vacations in the past two weeks, visiting friends and drinking masala chai. Now that I’m back, I’ve been giving Hyper Bun Buster some new visual effects and continuing my quality pass on its arcade mode’s stages.

Retro fog effect

I love retro fullscreen fog effects that warp as they scroll down the screen, like what you see on older platforms that support HBlank effects. After learning a bit more about shader programming, I made one and added it to the swamp stage:

Boss attack telegraphs

Some of Hyper Bun Buster’s boss fights can be pretty chaotic, with projectiles and rocks and penguins flying all over the place. Sometimes this could make it harder to notice when the actual boss is about to attack, so I added a screen-filling telegraph animation:

More arcade stages

I’ve been spicing up the rest of the game’s arcade stages with a few scripted setpieces and room layout changes. Most of them haven’t quite been finished yet, but here’s the new chicken stage and ice stage:

The chicken stage is pretty much the same as before except with more hardcoded enemy waves. The ice stage has received some bigger changes, as a lot of the old rooms were featureless rectangles with a few lines of ice drawn on them and needed reworking. The new first room has ice chaotically strewn around on the floor, the second room has been shrunk down so it's easier to traverse, and the third room has also been shrunk down and given additional lanes of ice to ride along.

The rest of the rooms in the ice stage haven’t changed much other than when and where the enemies spawn in them. One of these changes was that the room with thirty-two cats in it no longer spawns any additional enemies after the initial wave of thirty-two cats. Those thirty-two cats have also had their decision making tweaked so they will no longer lead their shots by two tiles, which often caused you to get checkmated by a wall of fireballs because there were so many other cats blocking your movement that you couldn't get out of the way in time.

I love both of these new stages, and I can’t wait until the other stages are ready to show off too!

Anything else?

I cleared two loops of Rolling Bird! You can see my commentated run here if you want a better idea of how the game plays, or you can just play it yourself. It's free! Boghog recently wrote a post about Rolling Bird and the games that inspired it, if you're curious about its arcade roots.

I've been playing Singou Breaka, an action puzzle game about making traffic lights explode! It's one of the most claustrophobic and stressful puzzle games I've played and I love it.

That’s all I’ve been up to recently. I’m going to go clean up the rest of the game’s arcade stages and get back to practicing Final Fight. I hope you have a relaxing couple of weeks and I’ll see you next time!