hi, its austin.

i've been making a lot of progress on the stages!

constructing them to be a lot smaller and designed destination-first has helped out a lot. i've learned how NOT to set up an overworld through building the library. its now just me putting fun things in a place, then connecting them as tightly as possible to minimize the kind of "overworld walking fatigue" that people would get. this gives the player the same amount of interactive fun flavor in a smaller area.

i'm implementing some point-and-click and top-down mechanics to give some players things to do while exploring these areas too, hopefully to break up the monotony. its interesting to me to make stuff that plays with the bizarre mouse + arrow keys control setup. there might not be much of a purpose to it outside of small set-pieces, but we'll see if its worth it when the stages are completed.

i've also been doing lots of spritework. not very interesting on its own, but i feel like im getting a lot better at pumping it out and designing stages around the sprites. progress is going smoothly.

look at all these cute characters you can play as! these are all just cosmetic choices. there are some species ive left out on accident, but hopefully people find a sprite in this set that they can really identify with while playing.

each sprite sheet looks like this. it might look tedious, but its really calming and pleasant working on this stuff in aseprite. the only downside is that time spent on spritework is time not spent designing or writing or programming. it's all gotta get done eventually anyways.

Checkmage! is still in active development. If you want to support me, please consider sharing with friends. The game will be released on Steam and Itch for sale when I'm done making it.

Checkmage! on Steam  - play the demo now!

Bluesky - more updates, videos and sneak peeks