congusbongusgames

Wrote a #blog post about a game making philosophy I care deeply about. I love games that do more than just entertain, but enrich your life, by teaching interesting subjects, imparting wisdom, or inspiring with impactful stories. Games are uniquely good at this: understand complex systems via interaction, or experience empathy by living in another’s shoes.

https://cxong.github.io/2026/05/nutritious-games

And I would love to see more people make such games!

#GameDev #GameDesign

In #CrystalCaves, there are occasional signs with boomer memes like “Kilroy was here” or “Winners don’t use drugs”. If you’ve encountered these contemporaneously, it’s time to schedule a colonoscopy

OTOH #OpenCrystalCaves’s “remaster” mode will show a set of (relatively) modern memes!

#GameDev #ScreenshotSaturday #OpenSource #DOS #RetroGames

More eye-candy and also an important gameplay bug fixed for #CDogsSDL. Added flame particles, so anyone taking damage from a flame-type weapon visibly looks like they’re on fire!

The bug fix is missing “squares” in randomly generated levels. This is a big deal because it’s such a key part of the experience - details in alt text!

#GameDev #ScreenshotSaturday #OpenSource #PixelArt

RE: @congusbongus@mastodon.gamedev.place

This easter egg is giving me jump scares while testing #CDogsSDL. I guess it's a special day today!

#CincoDeMayo #GameDev

Added BONUS eggs in #OpenCrystalCaves!

A classic easter egg in #CrystalCaves. Did you ever shoot these? If you did they seem to leave random letters that are worth 100 points, but the eggs alone are 1000 points. Smarter not to shoot them right?

This is where the game tricks you! Because the letters aren't random, they exactly spell BONUS (there are always 5 eggs when they appear), and the last gives you 10000 points!

#GameDev #OpenSource #DOS #RetroGames #ScreenshotSaturday

It's #BandcampFriday and I've just released a new #electropop #chiptune track!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JkTq2FAN57E

This and an earlier similar track are both now available at https://congusbongusgames.bandcamp.com

Fun and boppy #WaveTracker #music. Perhaps I'll make more?

Added a poison bubble effect to #CDogsSDL

Unusual for an action game, C-Dogs is full of status effects like poison, confusion and petrify. Adding some juice like this helps make it clearer that something unsettling is going on!

#GameDev #ScreenshotSaturday #OpenSource #PixelArt

Big progress with #OpenCrystalCaves: levels 13 and 14 are done, including the “low gravity” mechanic!

Why the scare quotes? Because it doesn’t - as you might assume - make you jump higher, despite what the sign says. Instead it means when you fire it pushes you back a bit, so in “remaster” mode the signs are replaced with “heavy recoil” or “light recoil” depending on the level.

#CrystalCaves #GameDev #ScreenshotSaturday #OpenSource #DOS #RetroGames

New release for #OpenCrystalCaves!

https://congusbongus.itch.io/opencrystalcaves/devlog/1479607/levels-8-12-savecontinue-game

We’ve completed levels 8-12, and implemented game save and continue. Also made a quality-of-life feature where the game controls are shown to first-time players, complete with @kenney@mastodon.gamedev.place's keyboard sprites and mini-Mylo

#ScreenshotSaturday #GameDev #PixelArt #OpenSource #CrystalCaves #DOS #RetroGames

I've seen a lot of game devs overthink how to make their data files backward compatible (save files, maps, mods etc) but it’s actually easy! In this #blog post I show you how, with realistic examples

https://cxong.github.io/2026/01/easy-backward-compatibility

The key is that these files are often simple, so adding extra translation code and using a simple versioning strategy is sufficient. If you’ve made versioned APIs before you knew this already, but if you’ve never done anything like this before, it’s worth a read!

#GameDev