Wow, a lot has happened since my last post... we LAUNCHED Castle Crashing the Beard HD!!!! If you've been living under a rock, plz go play it right nao!

Check out this awesome piece of fan art:

And my own art pieces I released as teaser previews before launch (shoutout to @Deathink):

There have been a ton of streamers playing it, but my favorite so far is this guy who had no idea what it was. He has some great lines throughout the video as he's not sure whether he likes it or wants to find something to hate... "Tom Phillip" lol:

@Luis, @Pyragmus, and I are quite proud of it. I'm especially proud of a couple things:

1. It's HTML5: I made a finished game without FLASH! (that can still be played on the web!)
2. It's pretty mobile-friendly: If you've got a decent phone, you can play this game from ANYWHERE! This was actually a lot harder than it seems because Game Maker Studio's HTML5 coordinates are all jacked up (known bug) - so I ended up writing my own pure Javascript overlay for properly detecting touch events and passing their coordinates into the GMS2 game coordinate space.
3. 2 player mode: This is dear to my heart because most of the testing was with my 2 boys playing together

One thing I'm disappointed about:

1. No one mentioned the falling leaves in the game! I thought that was a nice touch...

The game was super well-received. That felt really nice cuz we weren't sure how it would do. We totally lucked out (and played around a bit intentionally) with all the tension around Friday Night Funkin's week 7 release (hopefully you saw our cheeky banner on the front page). Little could we have suspected that week 7's release would crash NG, and while NG was coming back online with the huge surge of traffic, those FnF fans were largely funneled to play our game!

I realize we were riding a wave built by other people, but dang it was FUN while it lasted. I was nervously checking reviews and messages every couple minutes and the feedback was just CONSTANTLY rolling in. It reminded me a bit of the hectic feelz when we launched Abobo's Big Adventure. 100k plays in 24 hours nearly gave me an ulcer.

I kept a video dev log of the development process (if anyone's interested in some behind-the-scenes footage). I broke them into the results of approx. 8-ish hours of dev time chunks. We were working on it in our "spare time" but, if we had been working on it full time, it would have taken about a month. Each vid is 1-2 minutes long. Crazy to me that it started with just a black screen:

[ CLICK FOR WHOLE PLAYLIST ]

One cool thing that happened post-launch was that @mike played it and was annoyed that there was pixel "shimmering" on his 4k monitor. He's gotten pretty adept at manipulating HTML5 Canvas pixels on displays from his efforts with Ruffle. So, he took some time and messed with the GameMaker rendering code packaged up from GMS2 and made it so the game runs PIXEL-PERFECT on all resolutions now. It's a small thing, but it makes a big difference to me. It's so cool to see it looking "right" on my iPad retina display.

One bi-product of Mike's efforts was the discovery that if you browser "zoomed" the old version of the game, all the pixel art would be rendered in SUPER CHUNKY low-res blocks! This seemed a lot more like a feature than a bug to me, so I made a video of me playing it in that mode (unfortunately you can't do this anymore, but if there's enough demand maybe I'll ping Mike to help me implement it as an alternate game mode):

So what's next? Well, I'm going to be focusing on USAxe Club for a while. The construction of our new venue in Lisbon, Portugal is pretty much done, and we've opened our doors not only for axe throwing, but as a real American-themed restaurant. It's doing pretty well, but we went into a LOT of debt to get it where it is now. Fingers crossed it gets as popular as we think it has the potential to.

I finished the conversion of our axe-throwing web-socket gaming system to Flash/Ruffle for much more rapid HTML5 Canvas development and easy animation of the axe-throwing game pieces. So far it's made development about 100x faster for me, which is exciting because it means I get to make some new, never-before-seen, axe throwing games soon! Here's a vid of me demoing the Ruffle-based websocket system:

Eventually I'm gonna need to go to Portugal so I can see this place with my own eyes...

In home-renovation news, we finished the concrete pour for the retaining wall, found the matching wall blocks (a whole fiasco in and of itself), built the wall, and went ahead and splurged on replacing the mostly-dead grass with new sod:

I read a pretty interesting book called "In the Beginning was the Command Line" by Neal Stephenson. Besides being mostly about the history of personal computers, it had some interesting philosophical chapters about the nature of "user interfaces" and what we potentially lose by representing very complex things simply (and what we gain by doing so).

Stephenson wrote another book that's pretty famous called "The Cryptonomicon" which came bundled as a recommendation from a co-worker with the command line book. I'm currently chewing, slowly, through it... no real opinion on it yet tho...

I got a raise at work for being a total hardworking badass, so that felt good to be recognized. Other than that, I've also very hesitantly picked back up eating right and exercise. Hopefully that lasts for a while so I'm not such a "fat ass" in addition to being a "badass" at work.

I updated my website http://www.pestoforce.com to have CCTB HD and a new section for some of my more experimental/quirky games. I also made it mobile "responsive" so you can actually look at it on your phone now.

Luis, Pyragmus, and I have been tossing around some game dev ideas. One idea in-particular, we feel pretty good about and want to work toward it once we've all recovered a bit from the launch of CCTB HD.

What do you think that idea might be? If you could have us work on something new and BIG, what would you want us to focus on?