Boss Rush Press Roundup!

It’s Friday, and Boss Rush has been publicly available for 4 days now.  What does the public think of this?  More than I expected, actually!  We’ve received some very nice coverage from a number of places!  Here are the ones I know about!

(With a special thanks to Shih Tzu, (yes, that Shih Tzu) who found a lot of these!)

Full list under the break!

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Boss Rush is Go!

So it’s been a long, funny sort of road, but after a lot of delays, (some completely unrelated to game programming, and a few, unrelated to Boss Rush at all) but it finally happened.

Remember Boss Rush?  The game about being a boss, that seemed like it wasn’t ever going to actually come out?  Well guess what.  Boss Rush is done.  Released.  And playable.  Finally!

BossRushGame.com

So what are you still doing here?  Play it already!  Go!  Go!

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Transfer Complete!

If you’re reading this, then that means the server change has worked, and I have successfully migrated the website to a new hosting provider.  Huzzah!

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Neverending [Cave] Story

Fly away Cave Story, fly away!I assume that most people are in-the-know about such things, but in case anyone missed it, today is the day on which the WiiWare version of Cave Story has finally been released.  It is looking mighty fine.  Mighty fine indeed.

Sadly, for various (amicable) reasons, they weren’t able to keep Shih-Tzu’s excellent translation, but from everything I’ve seen and heard, the replacement is still quite good.

And if you’re reading this and you still don’t know what Cave Story is, then it is possible you have wasted your life, and there is nothing that I can say that will make things better.

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Case Study: Risk/Reward in Imperishable Night

Character Select

Your first big risk/reward choice.

I’m trying to avoid having Touhou games take up too much space here.  I don’t want to turn into “another guy on the internet who won’t shut up about ZUN’s Shmups.”  But deconstructing them lately has been fairly fascinating stuff, and I wanted to take a moment to talk a bit about what seems like a high point in the series – Touhou 8: Imperishable Night.  It has a lot of neat things going for it, but I’m going to focus on one particular aspect of its design:  Layered risk/reward mechanisms.

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GDCeems like only yesterday…

GDCAnd thus another year’s Game Developer’s Conference has come and gone.  I was going to post some photos, but after digging through my camera roll, it seems that I didn’t take as many as I remembered, and none of them turned out terribly well.  So instead, I’m just going to skip the pictures, and use only text.  And take you there, gentle reader, through the magic of reading!!

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Player-tuned SHMUPS or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb

I love it!

I’ve been thinking a bit about the role of bombs in SHMUPS, and why they are always there.  While I have never been a fan of doing things “because all the other games do them”, the more I have thought about the bombs, the more I have realized just how many problems they solve in ingenious ways.  This has been floating around in my head a lot lately, but a recent conversation with a friend brought it to the fore.  It made me realize that not everyone appreciates bombs as I do!

Intolerable!

Clearly the only way this could possibly be resolved is via an overblown blog post.  To the internets!

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Posted in Game Design | 2 Comments

What are the haps, my peeps?

QuestionsSo right about now, a reasonable question might be “So what ever happened to Boss Rush?”

It HAS been about two and a half months since the last official word.  And at the time, the word was “any moment now, for real!”

So where is it at?

Well, happy news!  While there have been a few delays, it is still there, and still about to be released.  It is on a test server right now, and this is (hopefully!) the last week of pounding on it.

Also!

There is a new project in the works!  While it has a ways to go, it is coming along rather nicely, and is looking pretty neat.  It should be announced soon as well!

The tl;dr version:  Boss Rush is coming.  Something else is too.

Cheers!

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Yet more press!

BossRushIcon1Getting some nice mentions!

First off, the fine folks at Level Forty-Two got to see a prerelease copy, and have a review up.  They seem to like it!  Yay!

Also, getting some mentions in blogs!

Very cool!

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Game Set Watch this space…

BossRushIcon1Nice!  Got a very nice mention on Game Set Watch!  It’s dated last Tuesday, so apparently I completely missed it in the thanksgiving buildup.  Nice!  They were even nice enough to link to my trailer!

Update: IndieGames.com has also given me some ink.  Double-nice!

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