congusbongusgames

Made an out-of-band bugfix release for #CDogsSDL

https://congusbongus.itch.io/cdogs-sdl

Other than that progress is slow but steady. I spent more time reverse engineering and documenting the music tracks in Super 3D Noah’s Ark. It is nice to come […]

[Original post on mastodon.gamedev.place]

For the music video I decided to take it easy and make a #PixelArt animation that's much smaller and less detailed than I've been making lately, which meant that making it was less stressful. I'd like to make a few more of this kind of thing to get back into the groove of things!

I recorded an #instrumental acoustic guitar piece:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hzO7URzTQhI

I can't believe it's been 2 years since my last #guitar composition! It was hard to get used to at first because I usually do electronic music, so everything I played sounded off beat. Just gotta do […]

Screenshot of level 5 of OpenCrystalCaves, which shows a blue rocky level split into left/right sections. The first section features a large cavern with platforms spread around, with a “Falling rocks” sign, indicating that rocks will randomly fall from the top of the screen, making platforming a tense challenge. The second section features long vertical shafts that lead to stalagmites at the bottom, with crystals in the many ledges on the sides.

Level 5 of #OpenCrystalCaves is now “complete”; as we’ve implemented most of the level loading, this came together much faster than before - instead of months per level, this took only a week.

Now we focus on unique game mechanics. Look closely and […]

[Original post on mastodon.gamedev.place]

Implemented the episode 3 boss of Super 2D Noah's Ark, Melvin the Monkey!

Melvin may be small but is quite scary as he's fast and throws dangerous coconuts! The arena also features lots of antelopes and ostriches which add to the challenge.

#GameDev […]

[Original post on mastodon.gamedev.place]

way back in 2017, jackson lango started writing a dev log about his passion project: an ascii/ansi adventure called Terminal Rain.

i was instantly in love with his lighting and animation. in an era overloaded with knockoff cyberpunk aesthetics, he had a keen eye […]

[Original post on dialup.cafe]

Made a new release of #OpenCrystalCaves!

https://congusbongus.itch.io/opencrystalcaves/devlog/984248/040

This release includes playable levels 1 & 3, both with unique mechanics, as well as features like sound!

The game has likely hit an inflection […]

[Original post on mastodon.gamedev.place]

Slow but gradual progress on Super 2D Noah's Ark - made this monkey character, who's the boss of episode 3

#CDogsSDL #GameDev #ScreenshotSaturday #RetroGames #OpenSource #PixelArt

And for the music video I made this #PixelArt #Animation with rotoscoping. Despite using this shortcut, animations just take a lot of effort to make!

Made a midtempo dance track; due to having extra couch time lately I revisited #GarageBand for this one

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7mmf_aq8bF8

It turned out alright despite my efforts: as I often find, creative works have a way of getting away from your original vision and taking on their […]

Working on some bug fixes and polish for an upcoming release of #OpenCrystalCaves, such as having the green "bigfoot” monster chase the player on hit, or tweaking the hurt boxes so that trick jumps work - they have to be just right!

#GameDev […]

[Original post on mastodon.gamedev.place]

Implemented the ox in Super 2D Noah's Ark. I got lazy and used a recoloured antelope, with a nose ring!

I also fixed secret level logic. Frustratingly #wolf3d games don't have a standard way of specifying secret level tiles and warps. Different games […]

[Original post on mastodon.gamedev.place]

Screenshot of Gold Rush, one of the first payload maps in the game. TF2 did not come out with payload maps but added it soon after, and Gold Rush remained a favourite as it went through many changes.

Entrance to the underpass in de_dust. Millions of hours were spent slaughtering virtual players in this tiny map.

Screenshot of the starting area of Supply Depot, a popular competition map in Enemy Territory. A landscape featuring rugged cliffs, a cleared area with trees, and two structures, a barn with a truck, with a path leading to a fortified bunker.

This #blog post was decades in the making, spawned from my early years playing classic multiplayer #FPS games like #CounterStrike, #TF2 and #EnemyTerritory. How do these games use level and #GameDesign appeal to different kinds of players, focus the […]

[Original post on mastodon.gamedev.place]

Level 3 of #OpenCrystalCaves is fully playable and the game is ready for another release. Progress has picked up so as well as building out features, I've been working on polish as well.

Now that the game allows dying, I actually died several times […]

[Original post on mastodon.gamedev.place]

Earlier in Super 2D Noah's Ark I added an antelope, which is just a sheep with longer legs and horns. Now I've added a giraffe, the boss of episode 2, which is just an antelope with a longer neck, and instead of horns they're called ossicones - a word […]

[Original post on mastodon.gamedev.place]

@futurebird I once mentored a learning Python workshop and we wasted an hour trying to install it on windows and figured out McAfee was blocking python.exe. The whole experience makes me irrationally angry to this day

Thanks for the tip about thonny, gonna be passing it on!

Also made a silly #PixelArt #animation for it. Drawing birds is fun!

#chicken #TimeLapse

This time I decided to take it easy and make a simple tune that's been floating around in my head for years and see how it turns out. It was a nice fun break for a change!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ROXV1CVf-rE

#Music #tracker #radtracker #adlib #opl3

Screenshot of xu4 showing a town map. The town consists of a large walled-in area with several semi-enclosed rooms, with various NPCs scattered around, and a prominent central room labelled "HEALER". Woods surround the town, and two guards stand aside the large entrance to the south.

Screenshot of a dungeon in xu4, showing a classic CRPG view with a large first-person view of a dungeon passage and stat and message panels on the right. The dungeon is a claustrophobic brick passage with closed wooden doors to one side and a ladder leading below in the distance. Stat panels show 6 player characters, and the message log shows previous moves like turning left or right and advancing.

Screenshot comparing various pixel scalers in xu4, with the same overworld map view of the player outside a town, on a peninsula. Shown are Point, HQX and xBR-lv2 pixel scalers.

Screenshot of xu4 showing the overworld map. The player is in an area nearby two towns, a water feature, and woods cover most of the land area. A ship is in the distance in the water. A message panel to the side shows other stats like player characters and the amount of gold.

While updating osgameclones.com I came across xu4, a faithful #UltimaIV recreation. It's quite a unique project, beginning way back in 2002, hitting version 1.0 in 2022 (18 years in beta!) and still actively developed to this day, with enhancements […]

[Original post on mastodon.gamedev.place]

Implemented a few mechanics in #OpenCrystalCaves, including being able to die (just restarts the level), the reverse gravity powerup, and the stop enemies powerup. To improve over #CrystalCaves, the stop powerup makes enemies blink, to hint that they […]

[Original post on mastodon.gamedev.place]

Implemented antelopes in Super 2D Noah's Ark - for expediency they are just taller sheep

Also adjusted the sleep animation so that larger animals like camels and ostriches breathe slower than smaller ones like sheep and goats. Realism in a bible game! […]

[Original post on mastodon.gamedev.place]

Progress is picking up for #OpenCrystalCaves, level 1 is largely done and moving on to level 3. #CrystalCaves has a lot of wacky features, like this air pipe that sucks the player in and can kill you, or this red mushroom which makes the player […]

[Original post on mastodon.gamedev.place]

Drew the head and hence (almost) completed this silly ostrich enemy for Super 2D Noah's Ark! Although at these tiny resolutions I've noticed it can also pass as a giant duck. Be afraid

#GameDev #ScreenshotSaturday #PixelArt #OpenSource #CDogsSDL

Screenshot of the airship in Final Fantasy 4. "Giving the player a fast travel mechanism (a shortcut, or fast-traversal vehicle) makes them feel more powerful, and the world feel smaller. It’s a psychologically impactful way of granting a reward, aside from plainly buffing their stats or giving them a powerful item."

Screenshot of Pokemon HeartGold/SoulSilver with the player and pokemon performing a cut on a tree, opening a new path. "Letting the player unlock more paths (in the form of waypoints or shortcuts) is an interesting way to provide a sense of progress. It gives the player the feeling of reshaping the world for their convenience, giving them a sense of belonging to the world."

Found some time to blog lately and wrote about map distances being misleading, how the sense of space is much more about travel time than the physical distance

https://cxong.github.io/2025/04/the-map-is-not-the-territory

This seems obvious but time […]

[Original post on mastodon.gamedev.place]

Screenshot of dark mode in Crystal Caves. The level is mostly black with some rim highlights, especially on the breakable "ice" blocks below the player

Screenshot of the remastered OpenCrystalCaves dark mode, which uses a blue monochrome palette. It is also mostly dark with prominent rim lighting, but there are also a mix of dark blue shades used throughout

Screenshot of dark mode for Crystal Caves HD. Most of the level is very dark, with some not so obvious rim lighting.

Here's a comparison of dark mode between classic #CrystalCaves, #OpenCrystalCaves remastered mode and Crystal Caves HD. The otherwise excellent HD remake doesn't do it as well as the original IMO, as the rim lighting is much less obvious and the whole […]

[Original post on mastodon.gamedev.place]

Added light switches for #OpenCrystalCaves. The OG #CrystalCaves did this cleverly: being limited to the EGA palette, they did a palette swap, changing lights to darks and darks to blacks, resulting in this atmospheric cave-like effect that is quite […]

[Original post on mastodon.gamedev.place]

Working on the ostrich enemy in Super 2D Noah's Ark. The model is actually based on the human characters but super deformed and knees bent backwards like a tzimisce monstrocity. Also I have yet to make head sprites for it, so you can all enjoy this […]

[Original post on mastodon.gamedev.place]

For the cover art I ended up making a very derpy animation, it was a lot of effort as I really underestimated how long it took to draw and animate 3 characters (3x as much effort as one character - who would have known)

#PixelArt #TimeLapse #Animation

Made a marching tune for a fictional 16-bit RPG!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2w-3Bcrr8co

This was quite challenging as it's a very new genre for me. There's other music like this and the composers truly worked some magic in making symphonic music work with FM synths; I can only hope to […]