Hello! I’ve finished my quality pass of Hyper Bun Buster’s arcade mode stages, except for the intro stage which I’ll work on closer to release. You can see four of the updated stages here:

Spike stage

The spikes in the spike stage remain active for 2.5 seconds after you step on them (was 1.25 seconds), so they are now much more effective at temporarily blocking off your escape route after you run over them.

I used these new more dangerous spikes to build a new stage, using a mixture of my favorite rooms from adventure mode (i.e. the completely spike-filled room at 1:47 in the video and the islands full of chickens and cats at 1:19), some old rooms adjusted to have more spikes in them, and some entirely new rooms. The boss now summons a few cats (at 2:22), which can be terrifying to deal with while the boss is trying to stomp on you.

This stage has instantly gone from my least favorite in the game to one of my favorites.

Hot pepper stage

I combined all of my unusued arcade-style combat setpieces into a new stage, loosely themed around the hot pepper powerup. It's powerful enough that it's essentially a win button, so the goal is usually to sneak your way through a huge crowd of enemies, pick up the hot pepper, and use it to quickly rip through everyone else. The first room (3:04 in the video) is a brand new room that introduces hot peppers but the rest of the stage is based on the challenge rooms I made back in October.

Spinning flamethrowers and factory stage

Before I figured out that I could make spikes more interesting by making them more dangerous, I was experimenting with other ideas for obstacles to use in the factory stage. Boghog suggested some kind of spinning propeller that you had to avoid so I prototyped it the fastest way that I could: by spawning a Ducky's Delivery Service windmill, which I had never bothered to remove from this game's codebase:

It played pretty well, with only a few issues. It was unaffected by walls, which limited the variety of ways they could interact with the level design. Splitting the playfield into thirds also felt a bit too cramped, and I couldn't decide what it should look like visually either.

Thankfully, Misty was in my stream chat and she had an idea that fixed all of these problems: I could make it a spinning flamethrower.

It looks cool, it's not as cramped as a Ducky's Delivery Service windmill, and the flames can be blocked by walls. I love it, thanks Misty!

These spinning flamethrowers are the first obstacle in this game that completely ignores the grid and can instead attack from all angles. I was worried that this would feel weird but it seems surprisingly fine so far.

Because I didn’t end up using the spinning flamethrowers in the spike stage, I added them to the factory stage instead. They visually make more sense in a factory anyway. I had already made most of the factory stage a while back but it now has two new spinning flamethrower rooms: one where you have to hide behind walls near the corners of the room to stay safe, and one where you have the jump powerup and have to jump over the wall of flames as it approaches you. Other than that, everything is pretty much the same as before except the claw machine rails can now move up and down. That last part took a while for me to program but it looks cute so it's totally worth it.

Fire stage

This stage was barely changed at all, as it's already my favorite stage in the game. The only difference is that more of the enemy spawns are scripted now, such as the synchronized attack pattern that introduces the long-range black boars for the first time at 9:21 in the video.

I noticed and fixed an annoying bug while working on this stage: the flames shot by boars were drawing on the same layer as the fireballs shot by cats instead of always being drawn behind them, so occasionally a fireball shot by a cat could sneak up on you by hiding behind by a jet of flames. Here's a quick comparison before and after I fixed it, demonstrating just how hard it used to be to see the fireball hiding behind the flames on the left:

What’s next?

All of Hyper Bun Buster’s arcade mode stages are now at a quality level I’m happy with! Well, all of them other than the very first stage, which I’ll work on closer to release.

The final stage and the hot pepper stage don’t have background art yet, so I’ll have to set that up. My current plan is that they’ll be palette swaps of the swamp and factory stages, but who knows what I’ll settle on.

A few of the stages still don’t have a boss yet, so I could work on those. Barely any of the bosses that already exist have animations yet either, so I could take the character designs that Nami drew for me and get them looking good in the game.

I also need to work on music, frog sound effects, co-op menus and a million other things. Whatever I decide to work on next week, my goal is to try and finish arcade mode fairly soon and to make sure that I don’t leave all of the music until the end of the development cycle like I always tend to do. Regardless of what I go with, progress is still being made.

Anything else?

I played a bit of the top-down arcade tank game Tank Force, which is the sequel to Battle City (NES) and Tank Battalion. I already liked Battle City as a kid but I'm having way more fun with this sequel that's balanced for the arcade instead of a home console, especially on Very Hard mode. The way that your movement snaps to the nearest half-tile in this series reminds me of the bump combat in Ys 1 and 2, but instead of intentionally trying to line yourself up a half-tile away from your enemy you're trying to line yourself up perfectly with them so you can shoot their bullets out of the air with your own. It's a really satisfying system and I'm trying my hardest to resist the urge to drop everything and try to make a game like this. Maybe one day...

The Clockmakers' Museum, currently housed in the Science Museum in London, is cool as hell. I highly recommend checking it out if you're at all interested in historical technology.

Gussun Paradise, the final game in the Gussun Oyoyo series, is one of the most beautiful looking games I have ever seen. It is inspiring. I hope I can make something that looks as wild as this one day:

That’s all I’ve been up to recently. I’m going to go get some rest, then I’ll get back to finishing up Hyper Bun Buster’s arcade mode. I hope you have a fun-filled couple of weeks and I’ll see you next time!