Advice on improving a game’s controls often takes the form of specific tips and tricks, such as letting you jump a few frames after falling off a ledge in a platformer, also known as “coyote time”. This type of advice is often useful but there are a few things stopping it from being a one size fits all solution: First off, there are plenty of legitimate reasons to intentionally make your game’s inputs difficult.

I was digging through my old notes recently and I stumbled upon a big list of Skullgirls balance suggestions I made to the designers back in June 2020. Most of these changes were related to Peacock, one of the main characters I played at the time. I stopped playing the game shortly after winning Evo 2021 so I have no idea whether or not any of these suggestions were implemented, and I assume none of them are relevant to the current state of the game anyway.

Hello! It’s been a year since I wrote a blog post about my goals for 2024, along with a recap of what I did in 2023. So I decided to do it again this year! It will be interesting to see how I did, but I’m going to start by talking about my year on its own terms before I compare it to the goals I originally set for myself.

Despite loving arcade platformers and run ’n guns, I’d somehow never played anything in the Ghosts ’n Goblins series until this year. I decided to start with Ghouls ’n Ghosts, the second game in the series, and I instantly fell in love. After trying out the other Ghosts ’n Goblins games it’s still my favorite, although there’s a chance that Ghosts ’n Goblins Resurrection will take the top spot in the future when I get good enough to clear it.

2025/01/04 update: I made this post into a video! See it here, or read the text version below After spending 2024 getting into lots of beat em up-adjacent or otherwise chaotic arcade games, and even working on a similarly chaotic and arcade-inspired game of my own, I decided that I was well overdue to play some actual arcade beat em ups. The first one I tried was The Punisher, a 1993 beat em up by Capcom.

I’ve always had a soft spot for top-down action games that take place on a tile grid, whether it’s pure action games like Pocky & Rocky or action-puzzle games like Bomberman or Pengo. There are a few different ways ways that character movement can work in these games, each with their own advantages and disadvantages. I put way too much thought about this while designing Chessplosion and my upcoming tile-based bump combat action game, so here’s a quick rundown of the most common ways of handling movement in these types of games.

(This was originally posted on cohost, hence the lowercase. I wrote this after I finished a first draft of my next game’s arcade mode, which had deep and interesting dynamic enemy behaviors but felt very flat and samey over the course of a full run because there weren’t any static setpieces that you could plan for and memorize.) please enjoy this diagram from today’s gamedev stream. it’s the memorization-improvisation scale for action games!

Hello! If you already followed this blog you might notice that a whole bunch of new posts suddenly appeared, backdated over the last year and a half. Cohost, the only social media site that I didn’t hate using, is unfortunately shutting down. Because of that, I decided to move the posts I made there over here to this blog. I made this blog back when I was first figuring out that I was trans, during a period when I was concerned about not sharing too much of my personality on the internet to avoid online harassment.

(This was originally posted on cohost, hence the lowercase. The post is fairly NSFW and links to an 18+ game, but it doesn’t contain any explicit images or anything like that.) yesterday a friend told me about an 18+ ““futa”” visual novel (developers’ words, not mine) called benefitship. one of the main characters (pictured above on the left) dresses exactly how i dress, has a similar body type to me, and is even called chloe, which is a name i almost gave myself before settling on cassandra.

(This was originally posted on cohost, hence the lowercase) i just managed to clear the first loop of sol divide, a 1997 arcade game by psikyo that’s almost exactly halfway between a shoot em up and a beat em up. my opinion on the game has gone back and forth so many times over the course of clearing it that i’m not even sure how i feel about it anymore. i think i like it?