Hello! I’ve now finished designing Hyper Bun Buster’s arcade mode stages, with the exception of the intro stage which I’ll polish closer to release. With all of the level design out of the way, I’ve been working on pixel art again.

Jungle stage art

The hot pepper stage no longer uses the swamp stage's background palette! It has its own unique palette now, along with the field stage's grass pattern and a normal water surface instead of lava. I'm really happy with how it turned out.

It also has plants that indicate where hot peppers are going to spawn. I gave them some big gross tongue-like leaves, which I'm pretty happy with. All that's left is to add a particle effect to let you know when another hot pepper is about to spawn, and the stage's art will be complete.

Fanart for a friend

My friend SkylordZoey's streaming anniversary was last weekend, so drew and animated a sprite of her as a gift. I've always struggled when it comes to drawing existing characters in pixel art but I really wanted to give it a shot, and I figured this would be a good way for me to practice my pixel art skills anyway. It turned out so much better than I could have ever hoped for:

This is one of my favourite pieces I've ever drawn! It took most of the day but I learned a lot about pixel art in the process, such as how to use someone's model sheet for reference, which details to keep and throw away when converting a complicated design into pixel art, and how much easier it is to draw a character's torso and clothing when I don't have to make them ridiculously short to fit them into my game. I'm really happy with the shading on her hat too! There are things I'd like to do better the next time I draw a similar character, such as the frills at the bottom of her dress, but that's all part of the learning process.

Drawing Zoey really got me into the mood to draw more characters! I was worried that I was going to make it to the end of the game's development process without drawing any other bosses and I'd have to cram them all in at the last minute, so this was a relief. So the next day I started drawing bosses again.

Cat statue

I eased myself into the boss drawing by starting with an easy one. The spike stage's boss never walks around or does anything complicated; it just jumps at you and tries to land on you. So I made it a statue of the cat enemy:

I gave it the same dark red smoke effect as the hot pepper powerup too, to make it easier to see in front of spike tiles:

I love this little cat statue.

Penguin boss

At this point I was ready to animate a real boss. My friend NomnomNami has already designed lots of bosses for me that I haven't put into the game yet, and I decided to tackle her penguin boss design first:

I had already briefly attempted to draw her earlier this year, but it hadn't progressed past a recolor of Tess (the game's main character) with a skirt. I simply couldn't figure out how to draw her hat or goggles, or how to squish her torso and scarf into the game's proportions. Thankfully it was much less of a struggle this time, thanks to the pixel art experience I've gained since then:

Here she is while she's ice skating across the screen:

And here she is in the game:

I love her! I'd like to draw the rest of the her animations after this, but unfortunately I’m ill right now and probably won't be able to get much work done today. Hopefully I can still make a lot of progress on her on Monday and Tuesday before I take a break for Christmas.

That’s the bulk of what I’ve worked on recently. The only other thing I did was spending a couple of days coming up with ideas for bosses for the stages that either don’t have them yet (hot pepper stage, final stage) or the stages that could do with their old bosses being replaced or upgraded (mice stage, factory stage). As much as I would like to drop everything and program those new boss fights, it’s extremely rare that I’m in the mood to draw pixel art so I’m going to keep drawing until I get bored of it.

Anything else?

I managed to get a 1 credit clear of Bomber Man and Bomber Man World, Irem's two arcade Bomberman games! My Bomber Man World run was played live on stream, so you can watch the highlight here if you want to hear me rambling while I play. I wrote a lot about both of those games in the descriptions of the videos but the gist of it is that they're my favourite single player Bomberman games, in no small part because they take away your powerups after each stage so you get to experience quickly powering up from zero to max power every minute or two.

It’s the Steam winter sale! You can save 50% on my games Chessplosion and Ducky’s Delivery Service on Steam and itch.io.

That’s all I’ve been up to recently. I’m going to go draw a few more frames of the penguin boss and get some rest. I hope you enjoy the holidays and I’ll see you next time!