My new game Ducky’s Delivery Service is coming to Steam and itch.io in July! Ducky’s Delivery Service is an action game where you are a duck who uses a propeller backpack to fly around and deliver mail. Master the flight physics, grow your delivery business, fulfill special delivery requests from other ducks, and earn time attack ranks and high scores. I’ve been working on this for quite a while and I’m really looking forward to seeing what everyone thinks of it.

I didn’t see this coming, wow. For those who aren’t in the know, Frosty Faustings is an incredibly well-run annual fighting game tournament in Chicago, and it was this weekend. I used to travel there from the UK every year until the pandemic hit, and although I wasn’t there this year, I highly recommend the event to anyone who is interested in any of the many, many fighting games that are played there.

One of Chessplosion’s free updates added a puzzle editor, letting players create puzzles and share them using puzzle codes. Here’s the trailer for it: In the time since its release in November 2021, I made a few of my own custom puzzles and shared them on twitter. But I don’t use that website anymore, so here are all of my custom Chessplosion puzzles: Queen Hallway Chessplosion puzzles usually have sparse walls, so I experimented with restricted movement.

After digging through some year-old posts, it turns out that my goals for 2022 were to release some big Chessplosion updates, improve my art and music skills, start making my second game, and figure out what was going on with all of my weird gender feelings. I hit most of these goals! Chessplosion now has a dungeon mode (see trailer below) and online team battles, I’m much better at pixel art than I was a year ago, I’ve done most of the work on my next game (although I haven’t announced it yet), and I came out as a trans woman.

I’m a fan of itch.io, but until very recently I’ve never managed to discover any new games just by browsing the site itself. The types of games that get featured on their front page are generally not for me, and neither are the overall top selling games on the site. The other way of discovering games on there that I know about is to browse the genre tags. But my taste in games is hard to sum up with genre tags, and I never know how to find which tags even exist in the first place, aside from ones like “#action” that are way too broad to help me find games that I enjoy.

Hello! Yesterday was Chessplosion’s one year anniversary, so I thought I’d talk about it a bit. I can’t believe it’s been a whole year since the game released! Development Chessplosion started life on October 29th, 2020, when I needed to make a smaller game to take a break from an overambitious metroidvania prototype that I was trying to make (think classic Sonic meets Metroid). I’ve always been a huge fan of top down 2D action games like Bomberman and Mega Man Battle Network, and at the time I had just recently been watching online beginner chess tournaments.

The playable characters in Chessplosion aren’t actually given a name anywhere in the game itself, but I call them chess ducks. But why do they look like that? Why are they ducks? They changed a lot over the course of the game’s development, so I’ll start at the beginning. Chess rectangles In Chessplosion’s original prototype, the characters were just a rounded rectangle with another rounded rectangle for a nose, and two thin legs.

When I was creating Chessplosion’s Dungeon mode, I had to decide exactly how it should look when the player moves from one room to another. Here’s some of the research I did back then, with some slow motion gifs to show exactly how this works in various games! Fading to black One way of switching between rooms is to fade the screen to black, then fade back in with the new room on the screen.

Here are the tools I used to make Chessplosion’s code, art and music: Code: C/C++ Language, Sublime Text Chessplosion is programmed in the C/C++ programming language, without using a game engine. “C/C++” just means that I technically use C++, but I usually stick to the features that are available in both C++ and C. Instead of using an all-in-one code editor like Visual Studio for code editing and compiling and debugging, I use the Sublime Text text editor and I only use the compiler part of Visual Studio.

Last Thursday I released dungeon mode as a free update to Chessplosion. It’s by far the biggest update I’ve made to the game, turning it into a procedurally generated dungeon exploration game along the lines of The Binding of Isaac or Enter the Gungeon. Here’s the trailer, in case you missed it: When I started working on this update, I didn’t plan on making the new mode as big as this.