Chessplosion's One Year Anniversary

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 movements of the pieces and the way that you have to keep so many different lines and angles in your head reminded me of those 2D action games, and I couldn't stop thinking about combining them. I was basically the protagonist of the Boss Baby tweet, except I was playing chess for the first time and thinking "Getting a lot of 'Bomberman' and 'Mega Man Battle Network' vibes from this..."

{{< tweet user="afraidofwasps" id="1177301482464526337" }

The initial plan was to make a Mega Man Battle Network inspired game where two opponents stand on opposite sides of a chessboard, throwing chess piece bombs across the center line to try and blow each other up. Then I could add a single player arcade mode and some online multiplayer with rollback netcode, and quickly release it!

It only took around a week to prototype this game idea in my engine, and it was promising. But it was ridiculously hard to keep track of everything that was going on during a match, especially with the lack of animated explosions.

The prototype game mode felt way too brutal to be the main mode of a game, but it was fun enough to be worth including as an extra game mode. So I kept the prototype game mode as Tennis Mode in the released version of Chessplosion, and I tried making the main game mode a bit closer to Bomberman where all the players can freely move around on the same chessboard.

It was exactly what I wanted the game to be! After that I just went wild, adding a ton of single player game modes that explored everything that was interesting about an action game with chess piece bombs. My initial plan was to leave out online multiplayer until a post-launch update, but I was competing in Evo (the big fighting game tournament) that summer so I got super fired up about rollback netcode and decided to give it a try. I ended up winning Evo and getting rollback netcode working during the same weekend!

Release

Chessplosion launched on September 21st, 2021. I was lucky enough for people to spend their time making YouTube videos and speedruns of the game, and I seriously appreciate the support! Huge thanks to everyone who bought the game or helped spread the word. During Chessplosion's development I was doing contract work for other game studios, but now I can work on my games full time! I really can't thank you all enough.

What have I been doing for the past year?

If Chessplosion only took 11 months from start to release, how come it's been a whole year since then and I haven't even announced any new games? What have I been doing?

For the first six months after launch I was still working on Chessplosion, weirdly enough. Dungeon mode and the puzzle editor were added as post-launch updates, along with adding spectators and team matches to online lobbies (which involved writing my own custom rollback netcode library to replace GGPO) and fixing a ton of lobby bugs. I'm not sure if this was technically worth it from a money perspective, but it made the game better and that's much more important.

I've also done some work on a Chessplosion console port, but it's not ready to be officially announced yet. The single player and local multiplayer content is all working but I haven't started porting the online multiplayer yet, and I have no idea how long that will take. Hopefully I'll be able to announce and release the console port next year!

The rest of my time has been spent working on a new game. It's about a month away from being ready to officially announce, so please look forward to it! I've been showing its development process in my newsletter too, so if you don't want to wait for the official announcement, that's the place to go. But if you don't want to sign up to the newsletter and you still want to see my next game right now, here are a couple of sneaky cropped screenshots that I tweeted out recently:

Anyway, that's what I've been up to. I can't overemphasize how much my life has changed since I started making Chessplosion, so thank you once again to everyone who has supported the game. I hope you end up enjoying the console port and my next game too!