The Game is ON graphics It's hard to talk about a puzzle game without spoilers, so here's some graphics instead: Here's an example of a solved puzzle, so you can see how it works: By solving the puzzles, you get jigsaw pieces. Collect enough pieces to unlock extra levels. You can also get jigsaw pieces by solving the puzzles in least possible moves and by finding pieces hidden in levels. Some are hidden behind other objects or produced after you manipulate buttons or other things on the screen. More details on the Steam page: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1386280/ Feedback & Share Bigosaur, 2020-08-05

The Game is ON I'm making a new game. It's features cool pixel graphics and wacky puzzles where you move stuff around until you discover a common phrase or idiom from English language: The Game is On The game will be available on Nintendo Switch and Steam. Check the Steam store page for details and wishlist it now: Feedback & Share Bigosaur, 2020-08-05

Dark World Update for Windmill Kings Here's some new content for Windmill Kings: This is the continuation of the main game story. After you deal with the black wizard and restore the order in the kingdom, you may think that everything is done. But no. There are more black wizards in the cult and they decided to strike back. They captured all your allies and cast a spell on you that made you forget all the magic spells. Your friends are kept in dungeons and fortresses deep inside the underworld. Explore the Dark World, rescue your allies and re-learn the secrets of magic before you take on hordes of new enemy types. The black wizards have somewhat different minions. They are slightly stronger than your army and don't require special buildings to upgrade. The battles in this mode will test every ounce of strategy you can muster. The Steam version of the game will launch in January 2020 with this update included. Nintendo Switch version will be updated in the meantime, I hope mid-December if all goes well. Feedback & Share Bigosaur, 2019-11-20

Windmill Kings Here's a project I have been working on for some time. It's a real time strategy game for 1 or 2 players focusing on quick battles. The Story Once upon a time, there was a king. After a glitched teleport spell created a clone, there were two kings. The evil black wizard betrayed the real king and the clone took over the throne. Help the real king rally the troops and get his castle back. Single Player Campaign The game has two modes. In campaign mode, you play as the real king who starts with a small amount of gold and an army of knights. You roam around the map and fight different enemies to convince them to join your forces: Archers, Healers, Ninjas, Champions, etc. You can also conquer windmills to get more gold to finance your army; and mage schools which provide you with useful spells like Meteor Shower, Freeze Enemies, Earthquake and Summon Giants. The campaign ends with an epic battle where you use all your forces and magic to defeat the clone king and recapture the castle. 2-player versus game In versus mode, two players play a battle with all the units and magic unlocked. You can pick the size of the battle, starting with a small skirmish with just two towers and ending with a total war with two castles on each side. You can also play this mode single player versus computer. Gameplay The battles happen in real time. You pick which troops to create and send them to destroy the enemy fortress while defending your own. The game offers a variety of tactics: Send knights and champions to attack the enemies in close combat. Archers are weak, but attack from distance, so you put archers and marksmen behind the knights. Afterwards you can recruit healers and clerics who can fight, but also heal other units. And you can add spies and ninjas who sneak past enemy lines and demolish their buildings. And finally there are giants who are hard to stop, but you can use some magic to make it easier. All units have an upgraded variant that requires that you construct a building during battle. You can also demolish enemy buildings to prevent them from recruiting upgraded armies. The computer AI is completely transparent - you can see how much gold and magic points it has and what exactly is it doing. This makes every battle feel fair. There are two difficulty settings: Easy mode for casual players and kids, and Normal mode for players who are experienced with real time strategy games. Feedback & Share Bigosaur, 2019-09-24

Seeders Puzzle Reboot It's been 4 years since I released my first Steam game: Seeders. I took a hard look at it and from this point of view, I was able to see all the shortcomings and problems it had. There was no character animation, and graphics lacked detail. Although the puzzles are good, the visual looks were poor. But even some puzzles, although they had good ideas behind them, were executed poorly. Players had to spend too much time actually doing the thing once they figured it out. I decided to give a major revamp to the game. Big enough to set it up as a separate product. This time, it would be the game I really wish I made in the first place, but I just didn't have enough experience at the time. The new version is called Seeders Puzzle Reboot. Here are all the changes compared to the original Seeders Classic game: Improved graphics. Some of the graphics used to look really plain and boring. If you played on a 1080p screen or larger, you could even see the textures repeat. At the time I made the original game, I was impressed by simple graphics of games like VVVVVV and Thomas Was Alone. What I learned since is that although consistency is more important than graphics fidelity, the original Seeders had consistently poor looking graphics. It actually took less effort than I anticipated to bring the graphics into good shape. Too bad I didn't see this as a problem in the original game. Character animation. The old game had almost no character animation. Our main hero would look stiff and it would make the gameplay look stiff and boring as well. As I gained a lot of experience animating Son of a Witch, I put that to use. The gameplay now feels fluid and the main protagonist feels alive. There was a lot of work to be done, because there are 16 wearable hats in the game, and each one was drawn separately, so I had to make that work with animations. No ambiguous puzzles anymore. For some of the puzzles seemed hard or impossible to execute, because the puzzle setup would lead the player into thinking that some of the solutions is possible because you might barely be there. It seemed like you could solve it in some trivial way only if you were precise down to the pixel. Based on discussion I had with some players on Steam, there were even some puzzles that could be cheesed that way. I redesigned all those puzzles to make sure it's obvious that the easy/wrong way is not possible, and players have to think of something else. Hardest puzzles are optional. Some of the puzzles were really hard to solve (for example, the machine that moves parts of the level in level 3) or execute (falling through the laser-protected hole while a beryillium pipe is falling at the same time protecting you). And for some, it took a lot of time to repeat if you made an error (like those 4 alien robots at the start of level 5). All those puzzles are now optional, you can do them to get more wearable hats. Because of these changes I had to draw more hats, so there are 17 in the game now (default + Jason's + 15 to collect). More Co-op puzzles. While the co-op mode in the original game is fully playable, it felt like some of the puzzles were really lacking co-op support. Now, many of the puzzles are still the same as in single player, but you have to solve them in different ways to enable two players to go through. This is especially visible with lasers in level 5, where you have to pass the vehicles to each other, or carry the other player on top of the spaceship, etc. But I also added more co-op only puzzles (i.e. you won't get to see those in single player) and some of the existing puzzles were redesigned for co-op by removing some pieces which made them trivially easy or adding some pieces that made them more interesting. I also left some of the tricky puzzles from the original mode to be available only in co-op mode, as I expect two players to be smarter collectively. Music improvements. The main menu music was just too intense. It's a catchy tune, but I really started to cringe every time I launched the game - and I had to do that hundreds of times during testing. I replaced it with a nice, relaxing tune that sets a nice atmosphere, but never gets boring nor annoying. I also migrated my audio mixer code from Son of a Witch, so now all the songs have normalized volume. It was all over the place in the original game and you usually had to adjust the music volume between levels. Added missing sound effects. One of the reasons the game felt stiff and boring was because there were next to zero sound effects. You would push a rock or a metal piece and they would feel like paper cutouts instead. You would jump on top of a spaceship and there was no sound. I have added over a dozen missing sound effects and coupled with music volume fixes I wrote about above, playing the game now feels like you are really there and your actions have an impact. General polish. There are a lot of small things that make the game look and feel nice. Simplest things like menu transitions, subtle animations when you select menu items, etc. I built these systems for Son of a Witch and now I migrated them back to the Seeders engine as well. Seeders Puzzle Reboot is that great puzzle adventure game that the original Seeders was supposed to be from the very start. I just wasn't experienced enough at the time to make it this good. Seeders Puzzle Reboot will be exclusive to Nintendo Switch for now. Feedback & Share Bigosaur, 2019-07-02

Paladin / Alchemist / RPG / Arena update A free DLC-sized update is coming out on March 21st. At first I wanted this to be a separate DLC, but I decided that splitting the player community is a bad idea and earning just a little bit more money isn't worth it. I want everyone to enjoy the same game. New features: new RPG game mode where you keep all gear and restart the current level when you die

new Endless Arena mode where you fight waves of enemies

new hero: Paladin, who has divine shield and does double damage to undead

new hero: Alchemist, who has a Golem companion, and prepares potions

8 pets with new effects: Crocodile, Mouse, Bee, Monkey, Whale, Cow, Ladybug, Cat

3 new random potion effects: Cold blood, Veteran Elixir, Astral Projection

6 new special effect items: Ghost orb, Critic’s Shield, Paladin Shield, Alchemist’s Visor, Halo, Ancient Voodoo Doll

10 new weapons: General Sword, Crippling Katana, Executioner’s Sword, Dark Slayer, Splitting Axe, Paladin Sword, Alchemist Sword, King Cobra Staff, Snow Tiger’s Paw, Steady Shot Bow

6 new achievements

2 new allied troop summons: Baby Yeti, Stone Golem

added a new blocked challenge room in the forest

added a new challenge room with baby dragons

added a new challenge room in the ice level (it’s a surprise)

added a quest room in the ice level to unlock the Alchemist hero Gameplay balancing: allowed summoning mercenaries into boss fights (except the final boss)

removed slowdown effect from Heavy Boots

Retort no longer creates mana potions

only one Retort shows for sale in shops

removed poison immunity for the final boss

significantly increased Poison Cloud spell damage

Poison Cloud effect scales with enemy size

improved AI for Snail, Ram and Snake pets

using teleport staff twice returns you to the starting point

fixed runestone drops in various barbarian challenges Bugfixes: Ethereal bow now shoots through barrels and boxes

Dog pet doesn’t take mercenary’s beer in the tavern

Foundry doesn’t melt mercenary’s beer anymore

Thief and Ringleader don’t jump on allies when confused

fixed bug with item drops when Yeti Elder and Earth Golem roll

fixed drawing position when Barbarian is mounted

fixed rare sound effect bug with Yeti babies

fixed position for some of the teleportation animations

fixed text showing last level seed instead of control hint after player dies

fixed occasional crash on MacOSX Feedback & Share Bigosaur, 2019-03-14

Replaying hero unlock quests Some of the players asked me how to replay quests that unlock heroes. You can do this by clearing the achievements that unlock them. To clear the achievements, you need to enter the DM mode. DM means Developer Mode or Dungeon Master, whichever you prefer. Start the game and press T to open the chat box.

Type /dm1 and press Enter.

and press Enter. Type /ca ACHIEVEMENT_NAME see below to clear the achievement. For example /ca EYE locks the skeleton hero.

to clear the achievement. For example locks the skeleton hero. Type /dm0 to exit DM mode.

to exit DM mode. Close the game completely and start it again. Here's the ACHIEVEMENT_NAME for every hero: Sorceress: /ca PROLOGUE

Druid: /ca DUCK

Archer: /ca ARCHER

Pyromancer: /ca FIREMAGE

Skeleton: /ca EYE

Rogue: /ca ROGUE Barbarian challenges achievements are named BARBARIAN1 through BARBARIAN12. Feedback & Share Bigosaur, 2018-11-21

Big Son of a Witch update Version 3.7.3 is online:



- new hero class: Rogue. Special ability is to use the sneak attack as the special attack with any melee weapon. You can still use the weapon's regular rage attack if you use it in the off-hand slot. He also has a special item that can unlock any door (except boss room doors), so you can unlock treasure rooms and escape tough battles

- Added a bunch of new achievements

- New potion: Vampire blood (get HP from kills. Multiple potions stack)

- New potion: Pickpocket (earn extra gold until you get hit. Stacks)

- New potion: Confidence (deal extra damage when full HP. Stacks)

- Added a new combat item: Sticky bombs. You can plant these as traps. When an enemy walks into one, it activates.

- Added a new pet: Racoon, who randomly drops sticky bombs across the room

- Added a new special room in the castle: the Gallery Room. This room is filled with enemy portraits and you can pick your favorite enemy to do double damage to them.



New NPCs:

- Join the Vampire Slayer NPC in the catacombs and help her kill a vampiress or the vampire boss for reward

- Dwarfs now sell stuff in the ice level

- Dwarven Blacksmith shows up sometimes and gives you ability to smelt weapons into runestones which are used to upgrade other weapons

- Mercenary NPC in the castle tavern gives you an item which can be used to hire mercenaries for a fixed amount of gold. DON'T TOUCH HIS BEER!

- Vampire Sword now gives HP while hitting enemies (instead of on-kill)

- A Redhead Warrior NPC might challenge you for a duel on the battlements



Tweaks and improvements:



- Redhead Warriors in the desert now buff their swords before doing the petrify attack

- Disabled invulnerability frames for revival in dungeon shops

- Reviving in regular game now gives 41HP instead of 61HP

- Celestial Hammer rage attack now strikes all enemies in the room

- Darkness, Confidence, Money is Power, Mega Boost effects scale the skill percentage instead of adding to it. For example, if you have 50% melee and 100% darkness, it results in 100% melee skill (not 150%).

- fixed bug when the remote player could join the game twice (i.e. two heroes would show up) if (s)he pressed the button twice too quickly

- fixed bug then Steam library is installed in a path with non-ASCII characters

- minor fixes and tweaks to UI

- updated some of the translations

- dialogue in the intro story now supports translations



Have fun playing! Feedback & Share Bigosaur, 2018-09-21

Son of a Witch launches on Switch September 4, 2018! August 22, 2018 -- Son of a Witch, the adorable action roguelike that won over hearts with official selections at IndieCade Europe 2016, IndiePrize 2017, and Game Access '17, is about to launch on Nintendo Switch on September 4, 2018. After 3 years of development and a successful launch on Steam where it currently holds 92% positive rating, the game is about to hit the console platform where its couch co-op gameplay will shine. A new release trailer highlights the magical hack and slash hijinks players will be able to enjoy in solo, co-op, and four-player sessions. Son of a Witch recalls the compulsive replay-ability of your favorite roguelikes but wraps it all in a charming package, making it a lot more welcoming to a wide range of gamers than your standard fare. But don't let the cutesy graphics fool you: Son of a Witch offers deep mechanics that reward constant experimentation and learning. Son of a Witch boasts over 120 unique weapons and items to discover. Players will only find a small section of these in each run, meaning the game is completely different every single time you play. There are also 7 playable characters with wildly different skill sets and abilities, over 20 bosses to beat, and 30 pet animals to find. Bigosaur is expecting the game to be even more popular on Switch, because players often like to play in couch co-op setting on the console. Milan Babuškov, creator of the game, said "After completing Castle Crashers for the second time, I started thinking: what would make a beat'em up game more replayable and interesting in the long run? Inspired by some roguelike games like The Binding of Isaac, I added procedural map generation and over a hundred different magic spells, items, weapons, quests and game mechanics that you can combine in interesting ways. Always having a new map to explore and weapon combos to discover is the reason many players already have 100+ hours in game on PC. I'm excited to see the community feedback on Switch, as it will be a great motivation to continue improving the game in the future." Son of a Witch will launch on American eShop on September 4, 2018. Check out the release trailer here. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rQY-P-vkLck About Son of a Witch Key Features Explore non-linear procedurally generated dungeons

Fight your way through random encounters with monsters and a selection of 24 bosses

Find shops, treasure rooms and challenge rooms

Complete NPC quests to unlock playable characters

Get help from one of 26 cute pet companions

Drink random potions to power up or increase the challenge

Identify and use powerful magic scrolls

Every weapon has some unique ability or attack type

Every item you find has its use or special mechanics

Single player and up to 4 player co-op

Three different play styles: melee beat'em up, magic shooter and archers sniping enemies from a distance

Permadeath. A new world is created every time you start the game, so it's always fresh and interesting to explore Game information Title: Son of a Witch eShop page: https://www.nintendo.com/games/detail/son-of-a-witch-switch Genre: Fantasy, Indie, Co-Op, Roguelike, Hack and Slash, Dungeon Crawler Developer: Bigosaur Publisher: Bigosaur Nintendo Switch release date: September 4, 2018 Screenshots, graphics assets: http://sonofawitchgame.com/media.php Contact information Milan Babuskov, Bigosaur switch@bigosaur.com Feedback & Share Bigosaur, 2018-08-22

Steam release! The first complete version of Son of a Witch is now released on Steam. After almost 3 years of development the game is finally complete. We have gone a long way since being featured by IndieCade and greenlit by the Steam community. With almost weekly updates it has been an exhausting but also a very enjoyable experience. This is the first release that covers everything I planned to make initially, and much more on top of that. But, this is not the end. There are many more things to come. During the development both the players and myself got a lot of new ideas, so you can expect to see some big updates in the future: more weapons and items with new effects, more mounts, more pets, more special rooms and NPC quests, and more magic. The next step is porting the game to Nintendo Switch. I plan to do that over the Summer and have the game ready for late August or early September. After that, I plan to have one big update with new content, most probably for the holidays by the end of the year. Feedback & Share Bigosaur, 2018-05-16

Mixing beat’em up brawler with bullet hell shooter in a single game The initial idea for Son of a Witch was to build a game that could be easily described as Castle Crashers meets The Binding of Isaac. I wanted to have endlessly replayable beat'em up experience with much deeper mechanics and ranged combat. But how do you combine two pretty different play styles? Beat'em up vs dual stick shooting In beat'em up games you have to line up with the enemy vertically to hit them. In a bullet hell shooter like Enter the Gungeon you can shoot in all directions. These two simply wouldn't work well if you just mashed them together, so I introduced some modifications. The main one was restricting ranged combat to the horizontal direction. You can shoot to the left or to the right. This goes for arrows, thrown weapons and orbs (magic projectiles similar to tears in Isaac). With some upgrades you can get spread shots, or mirror the projectiles on the other side, but the basic targeting is to the left or right. Having to line up to attack with both melee and ranged attacks made the combat easy to read and perform even when there are different types of heroes and enemies fighting. The standard vertical evading of melee hits now works for ranged projectiles coming your way as well. Level layout Beat'em up games usually have horizontally long, linear levels. There's almost no exploration, you just head to the right. I wanted to give the players that great sense of exploration you get from roguelike games: the map is randomly generated and non-linear. Sometimes it branches, sometimes it loops back. You are guaranteed to find a treasure room on every floor. There are 2-3 shops and often special rooms with NPC quests or mini-game challenges. Even if you find the boss and exit to the next level early, it's worth exploring the rest of the level to find better gear and level up your heroes. During playtesting I found that most players like exploration. The only problem could appear in 4-player co-op games when sometimes the players would spend too much time arguing which way to go. This is especially visible for situations when many new players join the game and just want to move ahead without discovering all the subtle mechanics the game offers. For such players, I added a Party Mode which features a linear level layout, but still gives you random weapons, shops and NPC quests. Balancing ranged and melee combat Initially the ranged characters had a huge starting advantage: they could hit an enemy without them striking back. If we just took your standard beat'em up monsters and threw them in a game where all the heroes are ranged, it would be really hard to provide a good challenge to the players. Either the enemies would have to be very fast to close the distance or they would have to have a lot of health to survive until they can threaten the player. Because of this, the enemies in Son of the Witch were designed differently: many of the enemies have ranged attacks and melee-only monsters serve as live protective moving shields. They usually walk in front of ranged characters and try to engage in hand-to-hand combat with the players while the ranged units are attacking them from a distance. Having more ranged enemies results in having to do more dodging in Son of a Witch than your regular beat'em up game. There are often some projectiles coming your way and you have to evade them. Since the projectiles are only flying horizontally, there's less dodging that your regular bullet hell requires. So, this mix is somewhere in the middle and you don't need inhuman dodging skills that some of the bullet hell shooters require. With all this said, you might still feel like the melee heroes are at a disadvantage. To balance things out, I added more mechanics that give melee fighters an edge in some different areas: While magic ranged attacks only deal damage to the enemies, the melee attacks also stun them for a second, interrupting their attacks or magic spells. If you use a weapon with the quick attack (all swords and some axes) you can stun-lock most of the enemies and just keep attacking until they die (or some other enemy hits you). Beside this, melee weapons have special rage attacks that can knock down enemies and stun many of the bosses. One of my design goals was making sure that melee and range heroes synergize when playing together in co-op games. Having different combat mechanics actually works really good. The knights can stun enemies and keep the ranged attackers busy while the mages shoot them from a distance while buffing and healing their allies. Knights can use magic too, just not that effective Beside magic projectiles, there's a wide range of magic spells. There are many different magic staves and every staff has a different spell effect: poison enemies, set them on fire, freeze them, slow them down or speed up your party, shoot lightning, create magic turrets that shoot at the enemies on their own, create obstacles on the screen, teleport yourself into safe spots, etc. Son of a Witch allows you to have multiple weapons at the same time, so you can combine different spells during the same fight. The magic is very powerful, so at first it seemed like the mage heroes would once again be much more powerful. To balance that out, I allowed for melee fighters and archers to also use the magic items, but with less efficiency. For example, the Snake Staff will buff a weapon with poison, but the damage the poison has a base value that does scales with the hero's Magic skill. So, a Knight hitting someone with a poisoned sword would inflict 3 poison damage per tick, while a mage doing the same would do 5 poison damage per tick. Another example would be the Earthquake staff that knocks down all the enemies and breaks the rocks with usable items or weapon upgrades. When a Knight uses the staff, it would knock down everyone and break 2 rocks on the screen. When a mage uses it, it would break 5 rocks on the screen. Some other weapons work completely the same. For example the Teleport staff just teleports the hero regardless of the level of Magic skill they have. Item and weapon drops When you mix two different play styles, you need to make sure that the player gets upgrades and powerups they can use. If I'm playing a mage hero, I don't need a triple-damage upgrade for an axe type of weapon. This can be a big problem for procedurally generated games. If you leave everything to the random number generator, your game won't be enjoyable. In Son of a Witch, I solved this problem by rating every item and weapon in melee/magic/ranged category and then multiplying the drop rates with the skill levels of heroes in each of the categories. For example, let's say we have an item with a drop chance of 10% and it's an item only used by Melee characters. Let's say it's a single player game, and the player selects a Mage hero, who has 30% Melee skill. At the start of the game, we reduce the drop rate to 30% of the original, making it only 3% chance now. You might wonder why don't we disable it completely? It's because it's really rare that a weapon or item is completely useless. Even if you are a mage, having a sword available could be useful to do some quests (for example, when the princess is attacked by goblins, the stun-lock ability of the swords is really useful) or complete some NPC quests easier. Beside that, the game gives you many upgrades during a run, so you might sometimes decide to switch hero class or become multi-class at some point and having at least some of the weapons available helps. By the way, Son of a Witch launches on Steam today. Check it out. Feedback & Share Bigosaur, 2018-05-16

Designing death in co-op roguelikes Single-player roguelikes have a somewhat easy task when it comes to player death. The genre itself dictates that once you die, it's game over. At least, if we adhere to the strict definition of roguelike. Some of the games allow for some progress to spill over into the next game, but all of them make you start over. Without this mechanics, the game isn't considered roguelike. Now, what happens when two or more players are playing? Is it Game Over as soon as one of the players dies? Or do you allow reviving the players? What conditions need to be met for the player to revive? Answering these questions makes a huge difference in the way the game is played. When deciding what's the best approach, one should consider what is the way you want your game to be played. Do you want to limit the game to player pairs of similar skill level, or you allow newbies to play together with pros? This is an important decision, because roguelikes are often hard games to play. Let's look at some examples and see how different decisions influence the gameplay. Enter the Gungeon Enter the Gungeon has limited co-op mode - only two players and the second player can only play a single character. Once a player dies, he becomes a ghost with very limited gameplay options. The revive mechanic is rather interesting. There's an item that allows you to revive the other player once. This works pretty good until a player dies for the second time. After that, you can soon get into a position where only one player plays for a very long time as the only other way to revive dead players is to beat the boss or find and open a chest. This means that Gungeon is pretty hard core and expects both players to play well. If one of the players is a newb, he will die often and get bored waiting to be revived all the time. The Binding of Isaac BoI doesn't really have the full multiplayer game. Only the main player gets all the powerups and pickups and others can only play as babies with limited power. The main player shares their health with babies, so it's easy to revive them when they die. It's an interesting mechanics, which makes it more enjoyable as there's no waiting time. However, less skilled players can quickly ruin the game for more experienced ones who have to decide between spending most of the game playing with low health or telling their partners to go hide in a corner and/or wait to revive. Rampage Knights In Rampage Knights the dead player turns into a ghost who can move around and knock enemies into pits or interfere with their attacks. With some item upgrades, the ghost can also poison enemies or set them on fire. This is a pretty good mechanics because newbies can actually kill enemies pretty quickly even when dead. The player stays in the ghost form until 10 enemies are killed. This is a decent solution to the death problem, but it does have its drawbacks. The main problem is that the players are revived to full health, so the players can simply take turns dying and go through the whole game with 30+ deaths. Another problem is that completing a level gets the dead player revived as well. So if someone is low on health after the boss fight, he can simply jump into a pit and get full health at the start of the next level. All this makes co-op in Rampage Knights much easier than the single player mode. Spelunky Spelunky also has the dead ghost mechanics. Dead players can knock down some enemies into pits or spikes, activate traps, etc. To revive them, the players have to find and hit a coffin. This is a good solution, however sometimes the dead players can get bored while waiting. Although they can do stuff, it isn't much compared to playing the game while alive. The only big problem with this approach is that the coffin only revives one player, and there's only one coffin per level. So, if you play a 3-player or 4-player game it means that some of the players would have to wait for two or three levels before they even have a chance to be revived. This pretty much ruins any fun for players who want to complete the game and not just goof around. Castle Crashers and Lost Castle Castle Crashers isn't really a roguelike, but I included it because of an interesting revival mechanics that was also reused in the recent Lost Castle roguelike. When a player dies, others have to come to them and revive them. This means they have to stand still and not fight the enemies for a while. While this mechanics works pretty good in Castle Crashers, in Lost Castle the enemies are much more aggressive, and it's almost impossible to revive dead players until the room is clear of enemies. Since the game has some enemies with high health this can take a while and the dead players can quickly get bored. Combining an experienced player to play with a beginner is not an enjoyable experience for any of them as the newb will keep dying and the pro will spend a lot of their time trying to revive the dead ally instead of fighting the monsters. Son of a Witch When designing death in Son of a Witch, I took a look at many games and weighed carefully what would be a good approach. The death mechanics had to satisfy the following goals: The game is a roguelike, so death should have some weight

Players shouldn't be able to revive each other infinitely in a loop

Pros and noobs should be able to play together and both enjoy the game

When someone dies, they shouldn't have to wait long before they can play again with all of their powers The goals were simple, but achieving them took a bunch of iterations. When I presented the game during EGX, I made changes to the way death works every day and then watched how it affected hundreds of players who played the demo. It only started to work well when I mixed up a couple of different mechanics: 1. The main way to revive players is to kill enemies When a player dies, he remains dead until all the enemies in the room are gone. 2. Allow reviving during the battle, but at a cost You can revive all dead players with a Life Staff which can be used once every 5 rooms. With mana potions you can do it more often, even multiple times per battle. This means that the players can stack up on mana potions for tough boss battles. The Life Staff is a pretty common drop, but it's isn't guaranteed to show up in every game and you don't know when or where you would find it. This encourages the players to explore and unlock every gold treasure chest they find. Additionally, undead heroes can also be revived with the Staff of the Dead which animates the undead 3. Players should be encouraged to cooperate Once a player is dead, a 20 second countdown starts, and others have to revive him or clear the room of enemies. If the players have no Life or Death Staff, they have to fight quickly to save the game. The bosses have more HP, so the timer is set to 60 for the boss battles. The possibility of the countdown timer makes the players care about each other more. Experienced players will seek to help newbies during the fights to prevent them from getting overwhelmed and killed. The timer also removes the boring parts. If a player dies he knows that in 20 seconds he will either be revived or a new game will start. In any case, he won't have to sit and watch while his friends are having fun. 4. A true roguelike offers alternatives Beside the Life Staff, there are a couple of items that can be used to instantly end the battle and revive the dead: Barrelize scroll quickly turns all the enemies into barrels and thus ends the battle. It's risky to do with bosses because they turn into big exploding barrels. You can use the Peace scroll that makes all the enemies peaceful. It doesn't work for bosses, so it's useful outside the boss fights. You can teleport away from the room with enemies to another room. This resets the timer to 20 seconds or stops it completely if you teleport into an empty room. There are two ways to teleport: The Random Teleport scroll and the Silver Coin which teleport you into a random shop on that level. The teleport scroll can be dangerous as you might show up in a boss room. The best time to use it is during the boss fight after you have cleared all the other rooms in the level and you know it will teleport you into an empty room. 5. Have an easy-mode character for newbies Sometimes it's best to prevent players from dying at all by allowing them to heal more often. In Son of a Witch, there's a playable healer character who can create food to heal the whole party. It's a great choice for new players and having some extra healing options can also help an experienced player when they are playing together. Feedback & Share Bigosaur, 2018-05-12

Simple A* pathfinding alternative with interesting side-effects A* pathfinding has become de facto standard for pathfinding in 2D games. However, it does place some constraints on your level design. While it works great in tile based games, I wanted to be able to place objects randomly at any pixel coordinate in the world. With a big map and many units it can get expensive to compute. In this case, developers usually just optimize their game loop, so that the algorithm doesn't get called for every render frame. Since my game is fast paced, I wanted AI to be really responsive to players moving around, so I searched for alternatives. Another problem with A* pathfinding is that it's almost perfect. Enemies always take the optimal path and become too predictable. I wanted to have some randomness and surprise factor without having to complicate the AI code too much. I also wanted some enemies to be dumb and sometimes not "see" the way to get to the player immediately. But I didn't want them to become too dumb and get stuck on simple obstacles. And then I discovered steering and obstacle avoidance. The algorithms are simpler, easier to implement and less expensive to compute. You can tweak many parameters to get different behaviors. With simple tweaks you can get the enemies to defend some areas, wait to attack until the player comes closer, act as a group, surround the player, etc. With a little bit of experimentation you can get some behaviors that seem very intelligent. Since I'm making a game where the players usually have to line up with enemies to hit them, I decided to make that easier for players by having the enemies do the same whenever they can. When the enemy is far away, their priority is to line up with the player while coming close enough to land a hit: The player can now just move to the right and not worry about having to line up themselves. Additionally, if the player has a ranged attack (throwing axe, shooting arrows, fireballs, etc.) he can simply start shooting and the enemy will make sure he gets in the path of the projectile before it arrives. This makes the combat feel fluid and easy to execute. For most brawlers the approach above would be enough. Castle Crashers, Rampage Knights and similar games manage to get away with such simple AI because they made their levels with almost no obstacles in the middle of the screen. For my game, I wanted to have more interesting screens with more stuff in the middle: rocks, trees, bushes, pits, etc. on the outside and furniture inside buildings. So, AI needs to be smart about those. Enter obstacles Now, what happens when we have some obstacles in between. My approach was simply to allow the enemy to hit the obstacle and then figure out how to go around it: How do you decide which way to go around? Remember, we are not trying to make the enemies perfect planners, so they can make mistakes. One approach is to simply check which path to go around the object would be shorter. This works fine, but I found out that simply choosing a random direction (UP or DOWN when the goblin hits the bush in the above image) works much better. When you have 4-5 enemies going after the same player, they would split and go around that tree using the upper or lower path. It makes behaviour for a group of enemies seem more natural. What if the unit has two paths of which one is significantly longer than the other? Or what if one of the paths leads to a dead end? Without going back to full A* pathfinding, we can simply make the enemy figure out they took a wrong turn and reset their 'going around the obstacle' state. We can have a simple variable saying how long should avoiding an obstacle take and tweak that based on the level design and the behavior we want to get. Protecting an area Now, let's say you want the enemy to protect an area and wait for the player to come closer? We don't need to change any of the AI code at all, just wall off the relevant part of the level and make sure it's longer than the 'longest path to go around' variable from the main AI code I mentioned above. The green line in the image above shows a long fence the enemies won't cross because the parameter for going around the obstacle is using a lower value than the green line's length. As the player comes closer to the bottom of the screen, the enemies start to have higher chance of coming out of their area to attack him. This works pretty good in more complex screens. Having the enemies divided naturally by the level layout makes the game more enjoyable for the player as he can fight enemies in multiple stages. In the image above you can see three disctinct areas for combat. The player is now in control and can decide on the tactics. Does he storm the enemy in the middle and then have two separate groups to fight. Or he would stay on top of the screen and allow all three of them to come closer so he can use combo to hit all of them with a single shot. Having the enemy AI constrained by the level layout makes the combat much more tactical than your standard beat 'em up. Now you just need to create interesting level layouts to give enough options to the player. Using steering to avoid erratic movement Now, what's steering? Since we run the obstacle avoidance AI all the time, we want to make sure that the enemy movement feels natural. Going diagonally towards down-left and suddenly turning up would feel strange. So, when the player drastically changes his position, we try to rotate the enemy movement in 45 degree steps. This makes the enemies movement fluid and easier to track. Of course, if you hit an obstacle, you would do a 90 degree turn instead. Sometimes you just want the unit to stop and go the other way. For example, if the tracked player is dead or escaped the room and the enemy starts tracking another player on the other side of the room. In these cases I allowed sudden turns because it feels ok in my game. But if you try it out and it feels wrong, you can smooth it out by steering in 45 degree steps every X milliseconds until you start going into the right direction. The exact value for X depends on the type of unit moving, so you should experiment until it feels good. Group behavior for enemies If you make the enemies treat each other as obstacles, you can get very interesting side effects. Most beat 'em up games allow enemies to walk through each other, but if you forbid that and use obstacle avoidance for AI, you can get cool group behaviors. For example, the enemies spontaneously form groups like in the image above without any changes to the base obstacle avoidance code presented so far. Surrounding the player In the images above, you can see three enemies approaching the player. As the first one starts to attack, the second one is avoiding the obstacle, i.e. avoiding the first attacker. As he gets close enough, he starts attacking too. In my game the weapon hit boxes are a little bit bigger vertically than the unit boxes, so you can attack an enemy if you're standing adjacent to them vertically as well. From the still screenshot it isn't obvious, but when you see it happening in real time it makes perfect sense. After that, the third one comes and avoids the initial two attackers. While doing so, he gets past the player as well. Then he turns to face the player and starts attacking from the other side. What's most interesting is that all of this happens automatically with the standard obstacle avoidance code. You don't have to program some special AI code for it. Since Son of a Witch is a fun and cartoony game, I only used the simplest algorithms, but you can make it more sophisticated if you want to. I recommend checking out the red3d website for more behaviors like Seek and Flee, Pursue and Evade, Containment, Wall Following, Queuing (at a doorway), Flocking (combining: separation, alignment, cohesion), etc. Feedback & Share Bigosaur, 2018-05-06

Steam key scammers are getting creative Ever since I announced the Steam release date for my game Son of a Witch I have been getting a lot of Steam key requests from press and Youtube/Twitch streamers. Many of those requests are actually fake - scammers just want to get keys to play the game for free or resell on sites like G2A. It might look like getting a single key to resell doesn't make sense, as it would earn them some small amount of money, but when you multiply that with the number of games coming out and the fact that they fake dozens of different accounts to get multiple keys for the same game, it does get substantial. To weed out the scammers, a good approach is to check their YouTube channel profile and look for the contact e-mail in the About section. However, this isn't always enough. You need to take a close look at the channel itself, as there are a couple of ways they can make it look legit. For example, I had a couple of Youtubers whose e-mail address checks out, but when I take a look at the channel, it seems like the last video they recorded was 2 years ago. If you see @gmail or @yahoo address, it probably means that it's an abandoned account and scammers found a way to get access. Another way to cheat is to buy fake YouTube views. I had key requests from YouTube channels that seemed solid. 1000+ views on every video. You would give a key to such channel, right? Well, after looking at it a bit more, I started to see a pattern: every video had between 1000 and 1050 views. And somewhere in the list, there were gaps - videos with only 1-50 views. And there were no videos outside those two ranges. So, there wasn't any video with, say, 250 views, or 1200 views. This means that this guy gets up to 50 views per video and he just bought 1000 fake views for some of his videos. Some YouTubers don't have an e-mail in their profile, but you can still do some sanity checks. The thing that I often do before even checking if e-mail is correct, is to go to their channel and see what games they cover. If it's your typical channel with Minecraft-only content, or AAA-games only content, then chances of them actually covering an indie game are slim to none. One of the approaches the scammers are taking currently is going the Twitch route. Unlike YouTube, it's impossible to get contact e-mail for a Twitch streamer. The scammers know you can't verify their e-mail, so you have to take the risk. But not really. There's a feature in Twitch called Whisper. This allows you to contact the streamer directly via chat. You need to have your own Twitch account to do this. I recommend you get a Twitch account anyway, so you can use it to get your game listed in the Twitch game directory, so the streamers can mark that they are streaming your game and you can track that. Feedback & Share Bigosaur, 2018-05-02

How changing my game's image tripled the sales My game Son of a Witch has been in development since 2015 and entered Early Access on Steam in November 2016. The game was initially named My Mom is a Witch. This name was memorable and unique, but many players and Youtube and Twitch streamers had problem saying it out loud. Take these curators for example: Because of this, I began to think that another name would be better. However, changing the name was a tough decision. The game won hearts of many players, including official selections from IndieCade and IndiePrize, all under the old name. Changing the name would mean losing some of the search engine traffic, word of mouth marketing and confusing the players. Since the main character is a son of a witch, the new name was obvious. It would even fit the story better. The only problem was that Son of a Witch is also a pun to a well known pejorative slang phrase which doesn't work well with cutesy graphics of the game. Because of this I decided to ask the existing players on Steam, and the feedback was overwhelmingly positive: everyone agreed that the new name is much better and easy to remember. There wasn't a single comment saying that I should keep the old one. On July 3rd 2017 I changed the name of the game. It meant going through all the marketing materials and updating the logo. One of the big problems were dozens of YouTube videos using the old name. The game basically vanished from YouTube that day, as nobody would search for the old name anymore. I e-mailed a bunch of YouTubers who had the videos with top number of views, but only one of them went back and updated the titles. Since I was updating all the graphic assets for the game store page with the new name, I decided to go and update the key promotional image. I still kept key actors: the knight and the Ogre Mama boss, but I changed the character poses and the way the scene is framed to give it some life. This change might look trivial, but the effect was huge. In the weeks following the name and the graphics change, the game sales went up 306%, i.e. the game sales started to triple. At first I thought this was just some temporary effect. But, now that I have 9 months of sales data, I can confirm that this increase in sales is permanent. A couple of simple changes moved the game to a completely new level. TL;DR: No matter how good your game is, the game's image is very important. Even if you think it's good, it's worth trying a couple different things and see how the players would react. By the way, Son of a Witch is leaving early access on May 16th, so check it out. Feedback & Share Bigosaur, 2018-04-26

SoaW: 28 new achievements Version 3.3.8. is online:



- 28 new achievements ranging from easy to very tricky ones

- tremor status effect now affects orbs, arrows, bombs and throw weapons

- increased the starting hero skills in casual mode

- fixed bug when releasing the attack button with a bow in hand would initiate the backup knife attack

- fixed bug when typing in chat would activate the backup knife attack

- updated some of the translations This version concludes the content I planned for the Early Access. I will dedicate the next month or so to extensively playtest the game for the final release, so only expect bugfixes and translation updates in this period. I have a bunch of new features I plan to add in the future, but I want the exiting Early Access release to be well tested and bug free. Feedback & Share Bigosaur, 2018-03-09

SoaW: 24 bosses Version 3.1.4 is online with the 4th desert boss: The War Elephant. This is an important milestone, because all the bosses I planned for the first full game release are now in the game. The initial plan was actually 20 or 21 boss, but as the game has been developed many new ideas came and now we have 24. I do have some ideas for 4-5 more bosses, but those will come after Early Access. Here's a short roadmap for the rest of Early Access development:



- Barbarian Hero with some special mechanics (shh, it's a secret)

- 12 special challenge modes to unlock the barbarian

- Hard mode

- 45 more achievements already planned "on paper", maybe more

- there might be some additional pets and items/weapons along the way

- a new trailer for the game

I plan to exit Early Access in May this year if all goes as planned. There are also some ideas that might be implemented before we exit EA, but most probably afterwards: - more mounts: baby elephant, horse, deer, green baby dragon (spit poison)

- additional quests and special rooms

- more weapons and items

Feedback & Share Bigosaur, 2018-02-05

SoaW: The final level Version 3.0.9 is up with the final, 7th level of the story, the end-game boss and the final cut-scene:



- a new desert level with a new status effect (thirst)

- completed the game story w/ the final boss fight

- some enemies have petrify attacks. Drink the dragonfire potion quickly to remove or use the Life Staff

- 3 new enemy types

- 1 new boss

- 2 new weapons

- 2 new items (both were present in the game, but didn't drop before)

- fixed the drop algorithm for the Magnet item

- bugfixes for ranged AI

- fixed "on sale" name translations for the potion shop

- blood runestones now give you 20 HP on top of +20 health increase

- balanced archery weapons and items drop rate

- allowed special / quest rooms to spawn in casual mode

- fixed a netcode bug where the Book of Ice would freeze enemies who are immune to freezing

- added more detailed decorations to the forest area The game can now be played from start to end, but this is not the final game and there's still a lot more content to add before we exit early access. The most important ones are the Barbarian hero and 12 quests that you will have to beat to unlock him. And after that, 2-3 more bosses for some variety in the desert level, a bunch of new items and Hard mode. Also, about 30 more achievements are planned now that the game is completely playable from start to finish. Feedback & Share Bigosaur, 2018-01-28

SoaW: Big item and weapon drop A new version is up:

- 17 new items with unique mechanics

- 5 new weapons with unique mechanics

- 4 new potion effects

- a new scroll: Confusion

- a new quest area in the forest where you can play baseball

- 6 new achievements

- all bows now come with a low-damage knife as a strong attack. You can use the knife to quickly break barrels and boxes and stay alive if you run out of arrows

- get a special reward from the shopkeeper if you buy all the items

- fireball + dark orb synergy now works

- fixed returning bow animation for the Archer

- fixed swoosh animation for melee swing attacks

- all Mom's Books can now be duplicated for increased effect (double poison/fire damage, double freeze duration, etc.)

- added a note showing which sword attacks are quick in the weapon description

- removed the Catacombs Shortcut from the daily challenge

- reduced the mana cost for the Bottomless Bag of Bombs

- show current run time on the pause screen

- fixed the Slime King boss netcode bug

- fixed bug when a player would get sticky feet if he walked into another player that had the effect

- added an option to show the timer during the game. PvP fixes:

- sudden death timer is no longer running when the game is paused

- using twilight staff spell only increases power for the caster

- turret staff clones now shoot at other players and cannot harm the caster

- fixed the dead animation glitch for the winning player after he gets smashed with the huge hammer Feedback & Share Bigosaur, 2017-11-12

SoaW: Yeties A new version is up with a new boss, the Yeti Elder who is a huge beast whose jumps cause icicles to fall from the top of the mountain. He can also spawn smaller Young Yeti minions who also show up in various parts of the ice level.



- Yeti Elder boss

- Young Yeti enemy

- Achievement you can win when you defeat the Crazy Santa boss

- Fixed the pause overlay size for non-English languages

- Improved the death animation for the Crazy Santa boss

- Fixed the Reindeer pet name

- Fixed the Snailbite arrow name

- Added new graphics for the synergy of Dark Orb and Freezing Orb

- Fixed the gamble scroll - now it can be used multiple times in the same room and enemies would always change

- Added all the enemies into the Gamble scroll pool

- Fixed Fog and Toxic Cloud drawing for screens bigger than 1920x1080 Feedback & Share Bigosaur, 2017-11-12

SoaW: Level 6 The Winter is coming. A new version of the game is up with the Ice Mountain level: - slide and glide across the snow as you fight - unless you have a mount

- 3 new enemy units

- 2 new ice weapons

- 1 new boss (Crazy Santa throwing exploding presents)

- added music and sfx volume adjustment to the pause screen

- fixed Mom Books drops for altars to match the achievement unlock description

- lightning now shoots through metal shields

- adjusted mana cost and base damage for some magic wands

- Fire sword now has 100% burn chance

- spawning minions no longer give you mana via Warbreaker (this is to prevent getting infinite number of points in daily challenge)

- fixed a couple of translation related bugs Feedback & Share Bigosaur, 2017-11-08

SoaW: New bosses Meet Ugh and Ogh, the cyclops. These brothers are a new boss in the forest. Cyclops is the weakest of all bosses, so there are two of them to make the fight fun. Since the catacombs update I focused on adding new content to existing levels and bugfixing any problems. I also added 10 new achievements to make the game interesting for players who completed all the levels. Another new boss is the Ringleader. He sometimes shows up in the dungeon instead of the Simerian Butcher. The Ringleader can jump on you similar to the way the thief does - except that he is faster and has greater reach. If he finds any bombs on you, he would use them immediately. He also steals and throws your other items around. I also added a new themed area in the forest - a long jump competition. You get some items as rewards for jumping certain distances. To jump even further, you can find some speed buffs like The Rabbit Amulet, Blur Potion, etc. There's also a Steam achievement if you manage to jump really far. Feedback & Share Bigosaur, 2017-10-05

SoaW: Catacombs update A new version is available with a lot of new content: The 5th level, Catacombs, with 5 new enemy types

New hero: Undead Skeleton Ranger

Unlocking the new hero is done via a special quest in the old part of the catacombs which is a really dangerous place

2 new bosses

3 new special areas in the forest

1 new mount (zombie pig)

1 new pet (finds hidden runestones)

Blue color skin for the sorceress character and achievement to unlock it

Elemental altars where you can get some powerful items and weapons

A dozen new weapons and items

Improved game engine performance

Darkness now increases your stats

Item and weapon drops are now slightly affected by starting heroes (ex. you are more likely to get magic items when playing with mage)

Avarice doubles coins

Fixed Amanda's AI on the final screen so she doesn't get stuck

Fixed problem with chat not being available on the character selection screen

Co-op death countdown now starts from 60 during boss fights

Increased lightning damage for the sword

Bow descriptions update after damage upgrade

Balanced runestone drops from rocks

Rebalanced poison to make the Druid hero more viable

Added more stats to pause screen

Status effect icons show up in two rows in co-op

Fixed many bugs Feedback & Share Bigosaur, 2017-09-15

SoaW: Beta testing access I want players to have a stable, well tested version to play so they don't run into any bugs. On the other hand, I understand that some players want to play the most recent version with the newest features. Because of this, I decided to make the beta testing versions public. Beta versions are the testing ground for new releases. They could have bugs or crash. Benefits of running them are that you get all the newest content and you can help me find the bugs sooner and thus make the game better for everyone. To switch to beta version, right-click the game name in your Steam library and select Properties option from the menu: Then click the BETAS tab at the top of the Properties window. Select the "testing - Unstable" option from the dropdown menu: Enter the password: minimum89012 Steam would then download the files that are different and let you run the beta. If you plan to play online multiplayer - both players have to have the beta version (there will be some periods in-between releases where the beta version could co-op with the stable version, but this is not guaranteed). If you decide to go back from beta to stable just open the Properties again and select "opt out" from the dropdown menu in the BETAS tab. Feedback & Share Bigosaur, 2017-09-01

MMiaW: Make your own undead army I'm working on the Catacombs level. There will be necromancers that raise skeletons. Once you defeat them, you can take their staff and animate your own army of undead: Beside skeleton warriors I plan to add archers and mages as well. There will also be a new music theme, traps and a bunch of new items, weapons and mechanics. Feedback & Share Bigosaur, 2017-08-11

MMiaW: The Dungeon is here The 4th level is ready. You descend into the dungeon where all the prisoners have been set free from their cells. Three new enemy types await you: a thief, a bandit and an assassin. The thief tries to jump on your back. If he succeeds, he starts stealing away all the items from your inventory. If he finds a bomb, he will immediately use it. You can knock him off if you use a rage attack, or find some way to hit him - including meteors, bouncing orbs or via a voodoo doll. Also, if anything knocks you down, he will fall off as well. The thieves use a curved dagger, which is a new weapon with a throwing attack and backstab damage bonus that you can also use yourself. The bandit is quick and uses a Morning Star that does a lot of damage. You also use this weapon if they drop it. The bandits will try to surround you from two sides, so watch them carefully. Assassins have a short poisonous sword and a shield. They move and attack similar to the castle Guard Captains, but poison attack makes them really dangerous. To counter all the shielded enemies, there's a new weapon in the game: The Excalibur. You can sometimes find this legendary sword in a forest, stuck in a rock. Once you retrieve it, you can cut through enemy shields as if they weren't holding any. The dungeon features a new level style, with a couple of new trap types, a new treasure chest type and new music theme as well. Feedback & Share Bigosaur, 2017-06-02

MMiaW: The Dungeon After a short break which included showing the game at Game Access '17 in Brno, I'm back to development. I'm working on the Dungeon level. For the first version it will have 3 new enemies and a new boss. Of course, a new background theme and new objects and traps as well. Feedback & Share Bigosaur, 2017-05-19

MMiaW: The Crystal Wizard The Crystal Wizard is a new 3rd level boss. He starts showing up randomly in the castle after you have defeated the Executioner. He's similar to regular small enemies (i.e. you can stun him, freeze him, etc.) but he has a magic staff which he can use to shoot at you, the same way the playable magic characters shoot. He has +2 orbs and a mana canteen with practically unlimited mana, which allows him to use the staff's special ability at will. His weapon is a Teleport Staff, which can be used to teleport to the opposite side of the screen. You can pick it up and use it yourself. Teleporting to the opposite side costs 2 mana, and you can also press the regular attack button to return to the position from which you teleported. This other action is free, but can only be done once. After that you would need to spend mana to teleport again. Some levels have hard to reach locations like walled off areas or parts across the chasm. These levels have a special preset teleport location, which is revealed if one of the players picks up the teleport staff at any point of the game. You can use the teleport staff to reach those places and return. That also includes the areas behind the shops in the forest, so now you can go there and break the barrel without needing two pets (bear+dog) to get the items. The teleport return point remains active even if you leave the room, but you have to be inside the room to teleport back to it. The teleport staff can also be found in gold chests, shops and pedestals in the locked treasure rooms or blocked challenge rooms. Beside the new boss and the new staff, there are other changes. I added a couple different texts for the signs in the forest shops. I fixed the bug when the guards wouldn't attack you if you petrified the king and sometimes the level generator would create a shop adjacent to the king's room, allowing you to skip the boss fight in the castle. Feedback & Share Bigosaur, 2017-04-13

MMiaW: The VioleNt Knights Viole(n)t Knight is a new boss for the 3rd level (Castle). They come in tandems and start showing up after you defeat the Executioner. The knights are small in size and have a moderate amount of HP, but are really quick. They have a regular strike attack and a dashing attack similar to the playable Knight character. One of the knights always drops his sword, which players can pick up and use. The sword has the greatest reach of all the swords in the game and does 10 base damage (+12 for strong attack). The sword's special ability is giving full rage to the player after every kill. Feedback & Share Bigosaur, 2017-04-06

MMiaW: Pyromancer The Pyromancer character is ready. He starts with the Fireball Staff and has permanent fire immunity. This means you can walk on campfires which makes some rooms much easier. The fire spitting traps in the castle and the Red Dragon's breath only do a small impact damage to him, but cannot set him on fire. Because of all these advantages he starts the game only with 3 health bars (60 HP). He can be problematic for co-op, as you can easily set the other player on fire. A good strategy is to give the Fireball staff to the other player to activate, so he gets fire immunity. Or, if the other player is a magic caster, just swap the staves at the start and play like that. To unlock the Pyromancer, you have to find Amanda somewhere in the forest and escort her to one of the shops in the castle. This means that you have to go all the way through the Battlements level without her dying. It's a very challenging and interesting quest to complete. Feedback & Share Bigosaur, 2017-04-02

MMiaW: Hornet Queen Boss A new boss is added to the Battlements: A giant Hornet Queen. She can attack you or lay eggs from which the regular hornet enemies hatch. Both the Queen and the regular hornets have poisonous attack. The poison wears off after one battle. This boss starts showing up after you defeat a Dragon (either a fire or the ice one). Feedback & Share Bigosaur, 2017-03-29

MMiaW: New magic weapons and the king After you beat the Executioner, you proceed to the throne. The king greets you and explains that your witch mother wasn't really kidnapped. The king called for her because he has a major problem in the catacombs: Someone or something is raising the dead, and she's the only one who can stop it. You can choose to peacefully enter the dungeon and find your way to the catacombs. Or you can attack the king. If you defeat him and his guards, you can take the Royal Scepter, which enables you to summon castle guards to aid you. Beside the scepter, a bunch of new weapons are added to the game: the Shepherd Staff turns enemies into sheep, the Turret Staff creates standalone copies of the staff that autonomously shoots at the enemies and the Earthquake Staff knocks down all the enemies and destroys some rocks. The stronger your Magic skill, the more rocks will be broken. For combat, Earthquake Staff is a melee weapon - you can strike or knock down enemies, similar to Warbreaker Hammer. The Earthquake Staff is currently the only weapon that scales both with magic and melee skill. This means that you can upgrade it with both Warlock and Blacksmith runestones. Beside all this, two new room types have been added. First one is the Scroll shop, which sometimes shows up as an alternative to the Potion Shop. The shop offers all four types of scrolls for that run at a low price, and you can buy an identify scroll for only 10 gold coins. The second one is a special room in the castle where the Ogre Mama is fighting the castle guards. It can only show up if the Ogre Mama boss is absent from the forest. Additionally, the Fireball Staff now adds 1-battle fire immunity to the casted who activates the fireball buff. Feedback & Share Bigosaur, 2017-03-21

MMiaW: The Earth Golem A new boss is added to the forest area. He starts showing up after you defeat the Ogre Mama, or you play 20+ games. As you would expect from a golem, he is immune to poison. This one being an Earth Golem makes him also immune to meteors and petrifying. Now, this might seem tough, but he's still a first level boss, so once you learn his attacks it shouldn't be much harder to beat him. Feedback & Share Bigosaur, 2017-03-15

MMiaW: Themed areas There are now three special areas in the game, which randomly show up on the first level. The first one is the Troll Bridge. There's a tight bridge in the middle of the screen and you can either pay the toll to pass, or fight the troll. The troll is pretty fast and strong. You can use the bombs to get rid of him quickly, or attack him to get him to chase you away from the bridge and then cross the bridge and use a bomb to blast the door on the other side. If you have a really powerful weapon, rage attack ready or meteor staff with a voodoo doll, you should try to defeat him as he drops a lot of gold. The second area is the Garden. The farmer has a pest problem. The critters are coming out of the bushes and eating the flowers. If you manage to stomp on them, you can get weapon upgrades because each one drops a runestone. They are fast and never attack you. Because of this, they aren't considered the enemies, so you cannot use magic to freeze them or do something similar. The third area is the hunting ground. Well, not really hunting, but more like taming the beasts. Depending on the number of players playing there's one or more wild boars walking around. You have to chase them down, or hurt them from the distance to tame them. Once tamed, you can mount and ride them which gives you +2 speed. While you are riding, all the damage taken is split between you and the animal. The boars eat all the food, which heals them. If you get the Hunger curse, you can remove it with the Dragonfire Potion, drink a Beer, eat a Mushroom, or find a way to get off the boar. For example, if a Goblin Shaman drops a meteor on your or someone stomps a Voodoo Doll you're marked with. Feedback & Share Bigosaur, 2017-03-03

MMiaW: New weapons, difficulty scaling, better UI I decided to avoid having Easy/Normal/Hard option. However, to make the game easier for people just starting out, I decided to give players some powerful boosts until they manage to beat the bosses. The starting boosts are Books your Witch mother left for you. At first, you get a Book of Life that gives you 100 extra HP. You keep getting this book until you defeat the Ogre Mom. This helps with the fact that the player is still learning the ropes and the goblins do a lot of damage. After you beat the Ogre, the subsequent runs give you the Book of Ice which freezes enemies for 3 seconds every time you enter a new room. This helps from dying too quickly against the guards. You gain a couple of seconds to survey the room and position yourself. After you beat the Dragon, you start getting the Book of Fire, which sets all enemies on fire as you enter. After you beat the Executioner, you start getting a random item. Those items aren't as powerful as Mom's books, but still provide some help. The idea is that once you reach Mom in the Dungeon, you will unlock her (you can play as her) and then you won't be getting items anymore. A bunch of new weapons and items have been added to the game recently. I'm still tweaking those, for example The Rouge Sword allows you to conceal yourself, sneak behind an enemy and attack with massive damage. The current version on Steam only has the sneaking part, but I'm going to release a new version (1.6.0.) in a couple of days that has the surprise attack bonus damage. Beside those weapons, I added six new items and two new potion effects to the game. Some of the items are upgrades to Archery skill, while the rest are more general and can be used by any class. The new version will also have UI improvements. Most notably, the numbers next to icons will contain some useful info like plus, minus or percentage sign depending on the nature of the depicted effect. Feedback & Share Bigosaur, 2017-02-27

MMiaW: PvP arena and new bows A new version will be released on January 20th most probably with player vs player mode for 2-4 players. There will be about 15 different arenas - just like regular forest, battlements, castle levels, but without enemies. Items and weapons drop randomly on the ground or pedestals while the players are fighting each other until only one is left alive. To make it more interesting, a Bushido will spawn at a pre-set sudden death time, and chase the players around. Players can just battle it out with the starting HP they've got, or you can set up multiple lives for everyone if you prefer the rounds to be longer. You will be able to select one of the unlocked heroes or a Goblin Berserker (the one with the axe). This update will also bring in a bunch of new bow weapons with different effects: Feedback & Share Bigosaur, 2017-01-18

MMiaW: Chapter 3 is live This update brings the castle level, with new graphics and music theme. The goblins and guards are fighting each other while you are trying to reach the dungeon. Features: - a new boss

- Big Orc enemy

- the Royal Sorcerer enemy

- 4 new pets with new effects

- 3 new weapons

- 15 new items

- lightning based damage

- fire and lightning damage can be upgraded with the new items

- duration of freezing for ice based weapons can be upgraded

- pendants for ice, poison, fire, petrify immunity

- overdose random potion replaced with beer

- orbs can now be upgraded to bounce off the walls

- various reusable items: Magic Map, Magic Chest, Bottomless Bag of Bombs, etc.

- balancing of different weapons, spells, potions, prices

- fixes to enemy AI

- cut scene between chapter 2 and 3 can be interrupted

- other minor tweaks and improvements

Feedback & Share Bigosaur, 2017-01-05

MMiaW: Thunderstriker A new sword is added to the game: It's called Thunderstriker currently. If you have an idea for a better name, please tell me. It has regular swing and overhead strike attacks and the special rage attack is to shoot a lighting bolt. The bolt doesn't knock down enemies, and does 25 damage/hit, so it can deal anywhere between 50 damage to lesser enemies to 125 damage to a boss. The shorter range of the special attack is compensated by the longer range of the sword (currently it's the weapon with the farthest reach in the game), decent damage and ability to shoot lightning through obstacles. Get an Infinite rage potion and have some fun. . Feedback & Share Bigosaur, 2016-12-27

MMiaW: New items There will be some new items in the next update: There's a reusable map, bottomless bag of bombs, and a magic chest that turns mana into gold. Beside those, there will be a bunch of pendants granting you immunity to fire, ice, poison and petrifying. The Run Like the Wind potion is removed from the pool because it was OP - a new amulet is introduced instead which gives you a permanent speed upgrade. The Overdose potion is going to be replaced with a Beer item, so that drinking unknown potions isn't so punishing. . Feedback & Share Bigosaur, 2016-12-25

MMiaW: Chapter 3 coming soon The goblins are storming into the castle. While the guards are fighting back, you are trying to get to the dungeon. You need to go through the keep while the goblins and guards are both attacking each other and you as well. This gives you some interesting tactical options. Do you just evade them and let them battle it out before attacking the winner, or you try to help the weaker side to even out the balance of power. The next update will feature a new area with different graphics, background music and environment (traps, destructible items). And a couple of new enemies and a new boss. Feedback & Share Bigosaur, 2016-12-17

MMiaW: MacOSX The version for MacOSX is available for download. It features cross-platform compatibility, so you can play online multiplayer games with your friends on Windows. Feedback & Share Bigosaur, 2016-12-05

MMiaW: Archer's ready The Archer character is in the game. He shows up randomly in the forest as an NPC and gives you a quest. Once you complete the quest, he will be unlocked and you can select him. The game is on Steam: http://store.steampowered.com/app/539400 Feedback & Share Bigosaur, 2016-11-27

MMiaW: Almost there I spent the last two weeks preparing for the Steam Early Access release. There were some bugs in the netcode, mostly edge cases that happen once in 100 games. I did A LOT of play testing, and got some really fun runs, like this one with a bunch of pet animals and melee skill buffed to 250%. Unbeatable. I balanced some weapons and enemies, and added some play statistics. Some of the tough rooms no longer show on the first few runs. Beside that, there are some potions and scrolls that also unlock after a couple of games. The game is roguelike, but I don't want the players to be hammered by too challenging world on their first play. After you play 20+ games, you'll get the full sets of enemies, scrolls, potions, room layouts, etc. The game's coming out on November 10th as planned. Get ready for Thursday... Feedback & Share Bigosaur, 2016-11-05

MMiaW: Blood is optional Based on some player feedback, blood effects are optional now: The possible settings are: No blood at all

Only stains on the ground

Only flying particles when some enemy or player is hit

Full blood effects (both stains and particles) Having stains makes the levels look nicer, especially the boss rooms. However it's permanent, so I think some players might want to turn it off. The splash when you hit an enemy is temporary, but I understand it could be over the top for some players, so I made that optional as well. It took some testing to get netcode working right, because blood effects use RNG to set up and it would mean that the same seed now generates different levels based on the blood setting. I fixed blood to use a separate RNG and not mess with level generator. Only 10 more days until Steam release... Feedback & Share Bigosaur, 2016-10-31

MMiaW: Enemy health bars I have been quiet with adding new features to the game as I was preparing for the Steam release. Many bugs were fixed, netcode works properly again, and I made some changes to enable full controller support. That's right, now you can lean back and play it all with a controller, even stuff like entering player names and password codes for online multiplayer. The Glacier has been nerfed a little bit - the special Freeze All Enemies power is now magic based instead of rage based. It needs 2 mana bars to activate. It's still very powerful, but not game breaking anymore. I also added health bars to enemies: I was a little bit conflicted about this change. Neither Castle Crashers nor The Binding of Isaac have those. But Rampage Knights has, and the combat feels better. You would rarely look at the health bar for the enemy, but sometimes it gets important, esp. when you're dealing with bigger crowds - it makes it easier to pick those you can one-shot and remove from the battle. I understand some players might not like it, so it's optional. You can turn it off in the Graphics settings. Feedback & Share Bigosaur, 2016-10-20

MMiaW: Celestial Smasher Here's a run showing the first two levels. The game is procedurally generated on every new play, so you get to use different weapons. The video shows what you can do with the Celestial Smasher hammer. The game's Steam page is up: store.steampowered.com/app/539400 Feedback & Share Bigosaur, 2016-10-09

MMiaW: Greenlit My Mom is a Witch has passed the Steam Greenlight process. Expect to find the game in Early Access soon. Why Early Access? Well, the game is far from my full vision. We have all the character graphics, but we still need a lot of backgrounds, props and animations. I want to get the game into player hands, so we can get some cool ideas on mechanics for future monsters and items. There are about 50 different items and weapons in the game currently, but I want the final release to have over 100. I already have a lot of ideas in my notepad, and I want to refine that with player feedback. The plan is to go into Early Access by the end of the year. I will release updates with new features every two months until we reach version 1.0 which will contain: 7 playable heroes, 44 enemies, 20 bosses, 100 items/weapons and 7 different areas. Feedback & Share Bigosaur, 2016-10-05

MMiaW: EGX 2016 I just got back from Birmingham UK where I demoed My Mom is a Witch on EGX. I had a double stand setup with two computers running the game. Four players could play on the left one, and two on the right one. The laptop in the middle just looped through the trailers all the time. EGX is awesome for playtesting. The game logged the play stats in the background: 1682 player-sessions were played. We gave away about 800 flyers to people who played the game, so everyone played about two games on average. Having two computers and multiplayer allowed a lot of people to try it. The event ran for four days, Saturday being the most crowded: EGX was open an hour longer during the weekend days, but that additional hour didn't bring in many players. Here's the breakdown by the hour: There were different categories of passes. From 10am to 11am only members of the press and players with super pass would come in, but they were mostly interested in AAA games, so it was rather quiet on all indie stands during that time. At 2pm there would be a huge influx of new visitors who had the afternoon pass, and when they browsed around and determined which games they want to play the interest for My Mom is a Witch would peak around 3pm. Playing sessions My Mom is a Witch can be hard for beginners, so the average playing session took only 3 minutes and 21 seconds. Most of the players started a new game if they died quickly. Here's the breakdown of the sessions: Action rougelikes are great for events like this because of the short length of a single game. Since play sessions are short many people can try the game. Contrast this to an RPG that might take 30-40 minutes to try out and get to the core. In total, we had about 49 hours of playing time spread across two computers and four days, making it an average of six hours of play time per computer per day. I also tracked how far into the game would the players progress: 90% of the play sessions were long enough to experience the game properly. Almost half of the games went deep enough to discover some of the cool content like the item/potion/pet shop, treasure room or the boss fight. Since most of the players played twice it means that everyone has seen at least something. Of course, the game is roguelike and you only get to try a subset of weapons, items and mechanics on each playthrough. One of the goals for EGX was to get My Mom is a Witch through Greenlight. It was a failure in that regard. For the first three days, we only got nine Greenlight votes. Saturday evening I did some major changes to the game. I added a revival timer for multiplayer games, which made the game more fun. Also, I changed some of the controls to make it more intuitive to the players. This resulted in many happy faces and we got 30 votes that day. Still, going all the way to Birmingham to get 40 greenlight votes (or even 120 if we had a better build ready from the start) isn't really a good deal. TL;DR: Greenlight marketing has to be done some other way. Feedback & Share Bigosaur, 2016-09-29

MMiaW: The Red Dragon The Red Dragon is one of the toughest bosses in the game. He can spit fire and smash the heroes from above. For this fight I had a really cool combination of buffs: Appetite +2 and Gold Diet +2 which restored 11 HP for each gold coin I ate. My co-op partner died while beating up more than a half of dragon's HP. Funny enough, the final two blows were dealt by a Bat, one of our pets. Feedback & Share Bigosaur, 2016-09-10

MMiaW: The King's Guard The second level will have new unique enemies. First there are guards: The guards are quick and deadly. They can throw spears from a distance, or stab you when too close: Their spears have great range, longer than all standard swords, so melee combat against them is very challenging. Feedback & Share Bigosaur, 2016-09-03

IndieCade Europe 2016 It's official! I'm delighted to inform you that My Mom is a Witch has become one of the games selected for IndieCade Europe 2016: http://europe.indiecade.com/?p=339&lang=en If you want to see the game live, come to Paris on November 18-19, 2016. Here's a list of all the games that will be featured: http://europe.indiecade.com/?page_id=42&lang=en See you in Paris! Feedback & Share Bigosaur, 2016-08-28

MMiaW: Spitfire and damage types I'm adding some screens without enemies, but with traps instead. It creates an interesting variety. Instead of just plowing through the piles of enemies, sometimes you have to stop and carefully thread across the screen. Of course, some screens will combine enemies with hazards, which you can use to your benefit. These spitters shoot fireballs. Fire is one of the most dangerous types of damage. Here's a breakdown of the types of damage the game has so far: Petrify

Turns into stone within 10 seconds. Counter with Life Staff or Dragon Fire Potion. Fire

Burning drains health really fast. Regular fireballs, walking onto a campfire or getting hit by a spitter drains 50-60 health in a couple of seconds. Ice

Doesn't do any damage, but prevents movement/attacking for a couple of seconds. Poison

Slowly drains health. Can only be stopped with Dragon Fire Potion or Antidote. Hunger

Very slowly drains health. Can be stopped by eating any type of food, including gold coins if you have the Gold Diet buff. Feedback & Share Bigosaur, 2016-08-27

MMiaW: Battlements It's time for the second level. As our heroes launch themselves with a catapult into the castle, they land on the top of the battlements: As the goblin invasion is in progress, the battlements are filled with dangerous war machinery. The castle guards are defending a siege and have prepared various weapons and traps for the invaders. You are intruding here, so prepare to deal with the guards and the hazards at the same time. The second level is meant to be more dangerous, but possibly shorter than the forest area playwise. You're walking around the battlements looking for a way to enter the castle insides. Feedback & Share Bigosaur, 2016-08-21

MMiaW: First gameplay trailer Here's a video showing the some gameplay of the first level: Feedback & Share Bigosaur, 2016-08-21

MMiaW: Launch into the castle The forest level ends like this: I'm drawing the Castle Battlements (roof area) now and soon I'll start animating enemies for the Castle levels. Feedback & Share Bigosaur, 2016-08-07

MMiaW: The Knight The Knight is fully animated, programmed and ready to go: Compared to the mage, he has a couple of extra melee animations. The weak attack has three animations instead of just two and there's a special smash animation which activates when the last enemy in the area is lying on the ground: Feedback & Share Bigosaur, 2016-08-06

MMiaW: Potion shop Sometimes a special kind of room will be created in the maze: a potion shop, pet shop or a quest room. More on quest rooms later, but here's the potion room: Feedback & Share Bigosaur, 2016-07-23

MMiaW: Voodoo Magic If you snatch a voodoo doll from the Goblin Shaman, you can use it yourself once per area. You first bind it to a target and then drop it. Any damage dealt to the doll is channeled to the target. For example, if you stomp the doll, the target takes damage and falls on the ground. If you hit it with a sword, the target gets stunned and takes damage. If you hit it with a poisoned sword, the target gets poisoned. If you toss the doll into a fire, the target starts to burn: It took me some time to make this work properly for all the effects, but it's a really cool mechanics now. If you get bound to the doll, wait for Shaman to throw it down and then quickly pick it up and activate it to remove the binding from yourself and bind it to some enemy. Feedback & Share Bigosaur, 2016-07-17

MMiaW: Hammers and freezing effect Hammers are often an interesting combination of melee and magic weapon. The standard attack is a melee attack, but special attacks can be varied: The freeze graphics is generated dynamically at run-time. Because of this the enemies really instantly freeze in place. And here's the ice hammer: Ice Hammer's special attack is freezing all enemies on the screen at once. Feedback & Share Bigosaur, 2016-07-15

MMiaW: The story I have some cut-scenes planned for the final game, but currently a couple of placeholder images will do the job of showing the game plot: Feedback & Share Bigosaur, 2016-07-14

MMiaW: The first screen The first game screen features 5 different NPC characters that teach you the basic game mechanics: Some dialogs show up only if you have an appropriate type of weapon. You can hit anyone. Some of the NPCs will bear it until they die, while others might run away. At first I wanted to make everyone change their dialog when you hit them, but this is a tutorial screen and you might hit someone accidentally and miss an important part of the dialog that way. The archery is not covered. The idea is that bows are locked down and don't drop until you unlock the Archer. Once you rescue the Archer, he explains how bows and arrows are used. Feedback & Share Bigosaur, 2016-07-12

MMiaW: Archery There are three main skills in the game: Melee, Magic and Archery. Finally, all animations for the mage character are now complete: There will be a great assortment of bows and arrows available with different damage and special effects like fire, poison, freezing, petrifying, slowing, etc. Feedback & Share Bigosaur, 2016-07-11

MMiaW: Bushido If you attack a shopkeeper, you can snatch any item for free. However, he has a bodyguard: There are various ways you can defeat him though, but it's often very risky: Feedback & Share Bigosaur, 2016-06-01

MMiaW: Goblin Bomber Here's the first purely ranged enemy. He still gives you enough time to escape the bombs: He sometimes hits other goblins, so you can use that to your advantage: Feedback & Share Bigosaur, 2016-05-24

MMiaW: Meteor shower The goblin shaman's main weapon is the Meteor Staff. I'm testing how the meteors work: Looks like I forgot to limit the meteor count ;) Feedback & Share Bigosaur, 2016-05-18

MMiaW: Goblin Shaman dance Here's the first magic caster enemy. It's a goblin shaman. He does a magic ritual dance before attacking you from a distance: Feedback & Share Bigosaur, 2016-05-14

MMiaW: Updating character selection screen The character selection screen has some basic stats like Archery, Melee and Magic proficiency: Those numbers are percentages. For example, if a Sword does 12 damage, a hero with 100 Melee will deal 12 damage when he hits, while a Hero with 50 Melee will only deal 6 damage. Those skill numbers can increase and decrease during game with various potions and artifacts. The character on this screenshot has both Magic and Melee at 100 for testing purposes, but there won't be any such character in the game... Actually, one class (Paladin) will be close, but it will have something like 100/70/30 for Melee/Magic/Archery. Feedback & Share Bigosaur, 2016-05-13

MMiaW: Spiked balls Here's another environmental hazard: I call them SpikeBalls. Does anyone know the real name? Feedback & Share Bigosaur, 2016-05-12

MMiaW: Rings You might discover rings that give you special powers of the second sight. For example, the blue one allows you to see inside locked chests. Feedback & Share Bigosaur, 2016-05-09

MMiaW: Treasure On every level there will be some areas that are behind locked doors or simply blocked paths. If you manage to find keys or blast your way through (or teleport across, or ...) you can get inside and loot all the chests. Well, maybe not all. Some chests are locked and you need a key to open those. This beautiful gold chest is a drawing by George Alexopoulos who will be contributing some more art to the game in the future. Feedback & Share Bigosaur, 2016-05-08

MMiaW: Weapon Upgrades During the adventure, you will be able to upgrade your weapons as well. The upgrade material are the runestones, magic stones of unknown origin that can be used to improve damage and range of your weapons. There are different runestones for melee, magic and ranged weapons. The upgrade animation is still work in progress, but I'm getting there: Feedback & Share Bigosaur, 2016-05-07

MMiaW: Teleport So many ways to escape when things go south: blast a door with a bomb, use a scroll to open doors, use a key if some of the doors are locked... but now there's one more. A magic scroll that teleports you to a random location somewhere else in the forest: It never teleports you into a boss fight, but anything else is possible. Feedback & Share Bigosaur, 2016-04-30

MMiaW: Bombs Bombs have three different purposes in the game: 1. blast the rocks to find some items hidden underneath and to open some blocked passages. 2. blast doors to escape tough battles or locked doors when you don't have a key. 3. blast your enemies. This 3rd use is hard to do because the enemies are constantly on the move, but it's great for bosses because most of them will be stunned for a couple of seconds if the bomb hits them. Yeah, those exploding barrels are really in the game, but they have a special role. It's a secret you will have to discover while playing. Feedback & Share Bigosaur, 2016-04-25

MMiaW: Where there's smoke, there's (camp)fire Campfires are the first hazard in the game. If you step on it, you are set on fire for a couple of seconds, which is enough to deplete 80% of a fully healed hero. At least, until you buff your hit points. The fire does not kill you ever, but it can lower your HP to just one point and then a single enemy hit will bring you down. Enemies try to stay away from it, but with some skill you might be able to push them into fire by a well placed sweeping attack. P.S. unlike this .gif, the animation doesn't skip frames in the real game ;) Feedback & Share Bigosaur, 2016-04-23

MMiaW: Green Flame Yes, I like Acquisitions Incorporated ;) Here's a cool combo. If you get both the Snake Staff (poison) and the Fireball Staff (fire), you can buff the Fireball Staff with poison to shoot poisonous fireballs: Enemies that get hit will be set on fire and poisoned at the same time. Somehow the burning animation is missing here, I need to fix that. Feedback & Share Bigosaur, 2016-04-21

MMiaW: Pyromancies It's time to play with fire. One of the playable characters will be a fire mage, so I decided to play with various fire effects. Wands can shoot fireballs which explode and enemies can players can be set on fire and lose a lot of health while burning: Here's some animated action. The mage is still using the Snake Staff to fire fireballs, but there will be a special Fire Staff in the final game: Feedback & Share Bigosaur, 2016-04-19

MMiaW: More levels I got so many new elements, I guess it's time to build some variety of levels. Currently there are 15 different level layouts for the forest, but I plan to have at least 60 for the first alpha version: Feedback & Share Bigosaur, 2016-04-17

MMiaW: Shop There will be shops on each level, where you can buy various items like potions, bombs, scrolls, weapons, etc. I plan to have a special potion shop that only sells potions and a pet shop that sells... well, pets. Feedback & Share Bigosaur, 2016-04-14

MMiaW: Catapult The first level ends when you catapult yourself into the King's Castle: Feedback & Share Bigosaur, 2016-04-13

MMiaW: Sneaking behind Ogre Mom If you try to pass behind her back, you might get smacked in the back: I'm also planning an arena for the boss fight. There will be a small building for goblin warriors to come out and help the Ogre and there's a catapult that you can use when the battle is over The boss room will have a distinct door which cannot be blasted with bombs: Feedback & Share Bigosaur, 2016-04-12

MMiaW: Ogre Mom Here's the gruesome animation. I still need to work on some dust effects on the ground where the club hits: Feedback & Share Bigosaur, 2016-04-11

MMiaW: The first Boss Here's the first boss: Ogre Mom: She can be challenging, especially for beginners. She will have several different attacks, the main one hitting you with that huge club: It shows zero damage, because the player is invulnerable during testing ;) Feedback & Share Bigosaur, 2016-04-09

MMiaW: Time for some magic scrolls Here are the magic scrolls. Of course, first comes the less interesting part, like picking them up, storing in inventory, etc.: And then comes the fun part, i.e. using them: Feedback & Share Bigosaur, 2016-04-08

MMiaW: Throwin' that Axe As promised, you can pick up enemy weapons and use them. Goblin axe has a simple overhead strike attack mapped to the fast attack button. Pressing Strong attack button throws it: When your rage meter is full, you can use the sweeping mega throw attack: Feedback & Share Bigosaur, 2016-04-07

MMiaW: Mayhem I'm testing my game engine to see how it behaves in big battles: Two players, 15 enemies and it works as smooth as with an empty screen. The game will run on a 10-year-old Core2Duo CPU with integrated Intel graphics card at 60fps with smaller resolutions like 1366x768. For HD screens it pushes about 53 fps on that config, but if you have just a little bit stronger CPU or dedicated GPU like nVidia or AMD it will work just fine. It only requires OpenGL 1.1, so even some really old hardware will be able to run the game. Feedback & Share Bigosaur, 2016-04-06

MMiaW: Magic Multishot I got the multiple shots working. Reminder, it's an effect of one of the potions: You get more shots, but each orb is weaker. When you start a game with mage you make 6 damage per orb. When split, each orb does 5 damage, but you fire two orbs at once, so that's 10 damage, a nice increase. Of course there are other ways to increase damage back up: A good combo is when you add poison to it. You can easily poison multiple enemies at once: Feedback & Share Bigosaur, 2016-04-05

MMiaW: Some bugs are funny Due to my mistake parts of two goblins got mixed up: This looks so funny, I just had to post it. Anyway, the axe throwing works now: Feedback & Share Bigosaur, 2016-04-04

MMiaW: Goblin Berserker Presenting Goblin Berserker: This goblin combines ranged and melee into a single unit. His rage increases even without hitting an enemy and when the rage is full, he throws the axe towards the player. When up-close, he uses the axe to fight in classic melee strikes. Goblin Axe is a very desired weapon for warriors. It can be thrown from a distance. If your rage meter is full, the thrown axe is unstoppable and flies across the screen knocking everyone down. Feedback & Share Bigosaur, 2016-04-03

MMiaW: Locked doors and keys Each level in the game will have one or more locked rooms with treasures. You can unlock the rooms with keys or blast the doors open with bombs. Or you can use magic scrolls that open doors magically. Unlocked doors are not controlled by monsters, so you can use them to