Ken @kaesve.bsky.social · 19/09/2026On the small scale, ye. If you don’t have crazy expectations or a want to get the best graphics or whatever, a basic game engine isn’t _that_ crazy 000
Ken @kaesve.bsky.social · 19/09/2026Hmm, you’d want to hide the cursor so you can draw your own.. I have never connected a mouse to an ipad, so no idea if that’s allowed—but you’d think so 🤷 110
Ken @kaesve.bsky.social · 02/09/2026Chester: a walk in the park is a puzzle game with chess and dogs. And charming 1-bit pixel art of pretty scenes and friendly critters, hand drawn and developed solo! store.steampowered.com/app/4074100/...store.steampowered.comChester at the Park on SteamPick up the chess pieces to lead Chester the dog through challenging puzzles. Explore the charming Checkered Meadows, meet other visitors and befriend the cute critters that live in the park. 000
Ken @kaesve.bsky.social · 30/08/2026Where did you promote? I barely have 10% this, long way to go😅 000
Ken @kaesve.bsky.social · 29/08/2026Where do the toys come in? I do think looking at the footage it isn’t a bad name. Vibe seems to fit. But why not Gutter Guns or something? 110
Ken @kaesve.bsky.social · 29/08/2026Maybe tell us about the game? I have no idea what a game called gutter toy would be lol 100
Ken @kaesve.bsky.social · 29/08/2026If you like the art, you should definitely wishlist Chester: a walk in the park! store.steampowered.com/app/4074100/...store.steampowered.comChester at the Park on SteamPick up the chess pieces to lead Chester the dog through challenging puzzles. Explore the charming Checkered Meadows, meet other visitors and befriend the cute critters that live in the park. 021
Ken @kaesve.bsky.social · 29/08/2026Work for Chester tends to fall in 3 categories: engine programming, puzzle design and content. This week I worked on the latter; world layout, coming up w themes for areas, and filling them with art, characters, interactions to make the world come alive #indie #gamedev #pixelart #screenshotsaturday 1226
Ken @kaesve.bsky.social · 22/08/2026Added the ability to leave footprints in the sand. That makes Chester a #sandbox game right? right? #screenshotsaturday #pixelart #indie #gamedev 2389
Ken @kaesve.bsky.social · 21/08/2026I’m in Cologne! Not for #gamescom but @evoke.eu ! Haven’t been to a demoparty in over three years, super stoked to be back If anyone is in town and wants to play the secret Chester demo, hit me up! 130
Ken @kaesve.bsky.social · 21/08/2026(Any chance you’re going to demoparties? I’m heading to evoke right now and looking forward to yelling “AMIGAA” the whole weekend) 100
Ken @kaesve.bsky.social · 19/08/2026This is really funny to me for some reason. I love it! But now I feel you need to add lil hats too. I want my lil cell guy to wear a lil top hat! 100
Ken @kaesve.bsky.social · 18/08/2026Always tries to walk in the same direction without getting too close? 120
Ken @kaesve.bsky.social · 18/08/2026Looks cool! Is it a solo effort? What are you building it in? 110
Ken @kaesve.bsky.social · 18/08/2026Hah! I am aiming for 5-6h of puzzle content, so not even close to halfway :p. But I have roughly all puzzles designed, and there’s only a lil bit of engine programming left to support all the puzzles. Most of the work remaining is world design, art, scripting. 000
Ken @kaesve.bsky.social · 18/08/2026I worked 3 years on the first 30m of gameplay 🙃 I’m doing the engine, art, world design, scripting, puzzle design (not to mention all the admin and marketing) myself so it’s taking a bit! But I just updated the engine to support the next batch of puzzles, and designed a nee logo. Exciting! 230
Ken @kaesve.bsky.social · 18/08/2026Player presses PAUSE and the screen just starts to shake harder 020
Ken @kaesve.bsky.social · 17/08/2026Final version for right now I think. Just cleaned up, dropped the rook a bit and redid the paw prints 040
Ken @kaesve.bsky.social · 17/08/2026It’s the same as programming and anything else: just start doing! Pick up a pencil and draw! Then, it’s probably learn how to decompose something into shapes and to see what is off about your drawing and what to improve. But I am really not good at drawing! So don’t take it from me lol :p 010
Ken @kaesve.bsky.social · 17/08/2026That’s a good idea! I’ll try that. Dog chess game sums it up pretty well, so that’s good :) 000
Ken @kaesve.bsky.social · 17/08/2026I used affinity design on my ipad to do the original and most graphic design for the game (all the capsules and stuff). But for the new version I painted over it in procreate 121
Ken @kaesve.bsky.social · 16/08/2026Current design for reference. Is “Chester: a walk in the park” a better name? I like the word play 110
Ken @kaesve.bsky.social · 16/08/2026Playing around with the word mark for my game a bit. Is this any good? Is it too much? I like the chess pieces, but I am not 100% on the paw prints and T? What do you think the game is, from just this logo? Feedback super appreciated! #indie #gamedev #design #typography 3112
Ken @kaesve.bsky.social · 14/08/2026As a solo game dev who needs to do their own marketing, 2 sounds like super valuable advice! 010
Ken @kaesve.bsky.social · 04/08/2026I’m doing the absolute bare minimum for my game. I can always add more frames and angles to smooth things out later, but right now some characters have 2-frame walk cycles in one facing direction, and Im already overwhelmed by how much work it’s taking lol 110
Ken @kaesve.bsky.social · 03/08/2026There’s a lot of games you can make with very little physics! Arcade games like Tetris, snake, jrpgs, lots of puzzle and cozy games, and I am sure there’s a ton more (I also don’t like physics-y maths programming) 000
Ken @kaesve.bsky.social · 02/08/2026(Not trying to shoot you down! It’s not bad at all, but if you want to make it even better, these are the things that _I_ see. And making capsules is hard work. I spent _way_ too much time on mine. If you have critique for mine, I’d really appreciate it!) 110
Ken @kaesve.bsky.social · 02/08/2026I think you could hint a little more about what the game is? I get RTS with castles, but am i wrong? Turn based? Are you fulfilling a power fantasy? If so, I’d try to emphasize it Typography could be better also. I don’t think the drop shadow does much, and the letter spacing is all over the place 220
Ken @kaesve.bsky.social · 01/08/2026The number of times I thought “this tool is way too complex for _my_ use case, I’ll just build my own thing”, only to learn the hard way why all that complexity was necessary.. 120
Ken @kaesve.bsky.social · 01/08/2026No new game content to share for #screenshotsaturday, but here is my level editor for chesteratthepark.com. It’s part of the web prototype, which I still use for testing new rules and puzzle playtesting. It’s quite janky, but it runs on my phone which is really convenient! #indie #gamedev #pixelart 0153
Ken @kaesve.bsky.social · 31/07/2026Oh, you’re just ping-ponging the two buffers? Of course. Looking forward to your videos :) 000
Ken @kaesve.bsky.social · 31/07/2026I force-render itas unicode in-game with a ctrl char, which is invisible, so now I accidentally copy-paste it and mysteriously breaks comparisons… ughh! 040
Ken @kaesve.bsky.social · 31/07/2026Not quite cuneiform, but I use unicode chess symbols for piece types in my game. Such a bad idea! I have to find the symbol and copy paste it every time, which is annoying. The ♟️sometimes renders as an emoji, breaking monospaced code and in-game placement. 150
Ken @kaesve.bsky.social · 31/07/2026Why two displacement maps? Also, how do you implement wind? I want to have wind animations for my game at some point, but I’m not 100% sure how yet 100
Ken @kaesve.bsky.social · 29/07/2026Aha! That makes sense. It’s similar to what I do, but more like sprite sorting than depth buffering. And the extraction of the separate images. Mine just stays one giant 4k * 4k image the whole time 110
Ken @kaesve.bsky.social · 29/07/2026My game is playing chess puzzles with dogs. That counts, right? 120
Ken @kaesve.bsky.social · 29/07/2026Hm, but then you don’t have one giant background image, right? If i “draw it again overtop”, I’d redraw the whole world map, and Chester would disappear. And there is no tree image, so I can use math to check if they overlap 110
Ken @kaesve.bsky.social · 29/07/2026How do you know if you are in front of/behind something? Do you also draw stencils for each object? 110
Ken @kaesve.bsky.social · 29/07/2026I wrote my own aseprite file parser so I can grab this layer data directly in-engine. I similarly draw a collision map on a separate layer, and for sprites I have a layer with bounding boxes and anchors, and can import animations directly. No build pipelines! 010
Ken @kaesve.bsky.social · 29/07/2026So the world map is drawn as one giant image. You can still walk in front of/behind stuff, because I draw stencil maps on a separate layer, calculate depth maps, and do per-pixel sorting on the cpu. This means I can also hide eg only Chester’s hind legs, instead of dealing with whole sprites 210
