2D Con 2026 Postmortem2D Con 2026 Postmortem2D Con 2026 Postmortem+ What’s Next!+ What’s Next!+ What’s Next!

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Hey, everyone! I’m back from 2D Con! I missed WIP Wednesday last week because I was so busy preparing, so I thought I’d write up an early postmortem of my experience at the convention for you.

2D Con!

2D Con was an incredible three whole days of indie game action down in Bloomington, Minnesota. I brought Atmocopter (the game I’m making) there again this year! I’m a bit of a convention veteran at this point- I started demoing games at conventions waaaaay back in 2014, and have pretty much never stopped aside from a hiatus during the pandemic. I always get a lot out of them, and it’s endlessly fascinating to watch players both new and old play my games. I had steady traffic at my table throughout the convention, and got lots of great feedback!

To help charge up my motivation engine, I use conventions as pseudo-deadlines or milestones, and set out lofty goals to complete by convention time. I always bite off a little more than I can chew, but that’s intentional! I didn’t get a new world or new levels in the game in time for the convention, but I did get the first iteration of Mission Control (part of the hub world) in, and I got it integrated with the main game loop.

I was also able to add two NPCs: Noggin and Orbert! With the addition of a dialogue system, they can also talk. I also learned (perhaps re-learned) an important lesson: Players don’t read. Or rather, they won’t read, if reading isn’t necessary for progression. Mission Control may be integrated with the game loop, but it’s not really integrated until I give the player meaningful stuff do to there. That’s a good lesson to learn as I flesh out the world outside of the levels, and I’m going to have to keep it in mind. World-building through optional dialogue is important of course, but it’s not for everyone. Quests, shops, and plot progression, on the other hand, will help to really tie Mission Control and the greater hub world in with the rest of the game in meaningful ways.

Hit “Continue Reading” for LOTS more pics and GIFs!

WIP Wednesday:WIP Wednesday:WIP Wednesday:August 12, 2026August 12, 2026August 12, 2026

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Hey everyone! Hope you’re doing well and enjoying the summer. I’m here for another Work-In-Progress Wednesday all about Atmocopter! I have a couple cool new things to share:

New Area: Mission Control (Command Room)

The command room of Mission Control is sort of the main room of the game. It’s where you’ll select your next level, and because it’s so important I wanted to really make it something special. When you talk to a NPC in this room (yet to be added), you’ll be able to activate a projector in the background. It rises up and turns on, revealing a holographic display.

Next I want to make it so the camera zooms in on the holographic display somehow and transitions your view to a level select screen. Here’s a static close-up so you can see some of that good pixel art detail:

It’s definitely the coolest set piece I’ve done so far!

New Enemy: Malnimbus

Still very much a work-in-progress, the Malnimbus (“bad cloud”) enemy hides behind dark clouds, with only its eyes peeking out. The dark clouds are different than the light clouds elsewhere in the game- They absorb your attacks, protecting the enemy underneath!

The advanced features of the enemy aren’t implemented yet, but when you destroy all of its clouds it will get angry and rush forward towards you like a missile, blowing up when it hits a wall. Additionally, if you have a fan, you’ll be able to blow the enemy’s clouds away. If Malnimubus has its clouds blown away like that, it will drop down to the ground in shock and explode, defeating it just like that!

That’s all for today- I’ll see you next time with the last WIP Wed before 2D Con, and then after the convention I’ll bring you a convention postmortem and then we’ll be back to pixel art updates in the last week of August. See you again soon!

-Will

WIP Wednesday:WIP Wednesday:WIP Wednesday:August 5, 2026August 5, 2026August 5, 2026

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Hey again everyone, I’m here for Work-In-Progress Wednesday! There’s just a little over two weeks left for me to work on Atmocopter before I show it at 2D Con, so it’s time to put game development into overdrive. Here’s what’s new and what I’m planning to work on in the next two weeks:

New Feature: Level Palette Swaps

The terrain color of each level is now unique:

Changing the color of each level is something I’ve been meaning to get in the game for a while! The original version of Atmocopter had this as well, and now the new version has finally caught up. This is achieved via a palette swap shader. The original version of Atmocopter used hue-shifting, which was tricky to get right and never looked perfect. This time, I’m manually defining the palettes so they look nice. The way it’s set up, I should also be able to do some cool effects like changing the palette at runtime, perhaps for day/night effects in certain areas.

Editor Upgrades

SparkBolt Studio needed some upgrades in order to do some of the stuff I need it to do right now.

• Tileset Import
  Believe it or not, I forgot to put in a way to import a tileset. The tilesets currently in the project file got there via import from the Tiled format, so I needed a quick way to add new non-Tiled tilesets.
  
• Tileset Swap Filter
  This is really cool. With just a few clicks, you can swap any tileset with any other tileset of the same size and layout! I have a scene full of room templates, so I’m using it on that as I start building a new area.
  

Hit “Continue Reading” for more work-in-progress goodness!

Super Pixel Effects GigapackSuper Pixel Effects GigapackSuper Pixel Effects Gigapackv2.8.0v2.8.0v2.8.0

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Hey, everyone! I’m here tonight with Super Pixel Effects Gigapack version 2.8.0! This update brings five new effects:

In addition to the “alert” and lightbulb symbols you saw on Work-In-Progress Wednesday, there are three new effects: A fantasy “dispel” spell, a fantasy “heal” spell, and a sci-fi muzzle flash. You could also use the muzzle flash as a boost or dash effect!

Ready to get it for your game?

Not into Patreon? Never fear- The Gigapack can also be purchased below!

What’s Next?

Here’s my tentative schedule for August:

The next Gigapack update will be at the end of the month, to give me time to work and focus on Atmocopter ahead of 2D Con. It will still include five new animations, but they’ll be a little simpler. After that, I’m planning a big update with a lot of juicy animations in September for version 3.0.0 of the Gigapack!

I’ll be in touch next Wednesday with more Atmocopter progress. Stay tuned!

-Will

Mini-WIP Wednesday:Mini-WIP Wednesday:Mini-WIP Wednesday:July 29, 2026July 29, 2026July 29, 2026

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Hey, everyone! I’m here tonight with a mini edition of Work-In-Progress Wednesday!

Work is continuing on Atmocopter and SparkBolt Studio, so today I’d like to share a sneak peek of effects coming your way this Friday.

These two symbols will be part of the next Super Pixel Effects Gigapack update! The alert symbol could be used as part of a boss intro, or to indicate that the player is in grave danger. The lightbulb symbol is a little more niche, but perfect if you have a character in your game that gets a “eureka moment” and has a great idea! It could also be useful for a little juice when your game displays a tip or hint.

Some fantasy effects will also be coming your way- Stay tuned!

-Will

WIP Wednesday:WIP Wednesday:WIP Wednesday:July 22, 2026July 22, 2026July 22, 2026

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Hey, everyone- I’m here once again for another installment of Work-In-Progress Wednesday! This one’s all about the progress on Atmocopter.

New Feature: Animated Tilesets

It’s finally here! I’ve been working on this for a while. I drew several new animated tiles, and after wrestling with the engine and editor a little bit, got them in the game just fine.

Click “Continue Reading” to see more awesome GIFs and read about a tricky bug I encountered!

Super Pixel Effects GigapackSuper Pixel Effects GigapackSuper Pixel Effects Gigapackv2.7.0v2.7.0v2.7.0

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Hey, everyone! I’m here tonight with Super Pixel Effects Gigapack version 2.7.0! This update includes 10 new text effects with a brand new font:

Above, you can see the small versions of all the text effects. The big ones won’t all fit in the same GIF! An example of one of the large versions is below:

This batch of effects features a different intro and outro animation than the previous batch, matching its sleek, sci-fi flair.

Aside from a lot of last-minute bug fixing, I was able to add a sort of 3D-ish depth effect to the text this time, and I also got the kerning editor working! There turned out to be a lot more valid bigrams (character pairs) in English than I expected, so I narrowed it down to only the ones I actually use in these text effects.

I also wanted to do text for multipliers or combos, like “x2”, “x3”, and so on… But I realized I forgot to draw numbers for both this font as well as the font used in the other effects! So I added more non-multiplier text effects instead, and we’ll have to save those for a future text update. I’m happy with the variety of text we have in this update- There’s sure to be one or two you can use for your game, no matter what kind of game you’re making!

Ready to get it for your game?

Not into Patreon? Never fear- The Gigapack can also be purchased below!

That’s all for today- I’ll be hard at work on Atmocopter this coming week! I picked up a new mini PC to demo the game at 2D Con, but it turned out to be underpowered for the game. I knew I should’ve picked up a second one in 2024, when I got my other one! Then I got really sidetracked figuring out why Atmocopter was not only running slowly, but running incorrectly on that new mini PC. It seems to be a hardware/graphics driver/SFML bug, but the way the game was failing was so novel I couldn’t help but go down the rabbit hole. See you next WIP Wednesday!

-Will

Mini-WIP Wednesday:Mini-WIP Wednesday:Mini-WIP Wednesday:July 15, 2026July 15, 2026July 15, 2026

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Hey, everyone! I’m here for a mini-edition of Work-In-Progress Wednesday!

I’ve been working on a lot of behind-the-scenes stuff, including SparkBolt Studio. Here’s the latest!

I whipped up a small new tileset for Atmocopter:

This tileset is a blend of sci-fi and industrial themes, and is going to be used for one of the hub areas in the game. I’m excited to finally put the hub together!

Since I’ll be working with multiple tilesets, I wanted to make sure SparkBolt Studio was ready for it. After some improvements and a lot of bug fixes, multiple tilesets in the same tilemap are finally working correctly. Above, you can see a nice quality-of-life improvement: When you select a tile, the tileset view window switches to that tileset automatically.

Tile stamps also now support tiles from multiple tilesets in the same stamp! I was kind of surprised I designed it without that capability in the first place…

This week I’ll be bringing you new text effects, with a brand new font! This sci-fi font is named “Roboglyph,” and features angular, thick letters with heavier weight on the bottom and right strokes of each character. As you can see, because the letters are slanted, the kerning (space between letters) needs some work…

…So I’ve been working on a kerning editor to go along with it! Right now, it just displays every combination of characters and lets you browse them. I’ve narrowed it down to only character pairs which appear in English, but I’d like to narrow it down further to just pairs that appear in common English words. Reducing the number of pairs is important because I’ll be adjusting the kerning manually for each pair! If there are still too many in the end, I’ll just focus on the ones I need for the effects. Long story short, fonts are tough.

That’s all for today- I’ll see you later this week with text effects for the Gigapack! I might take an extra day to polish it up, so stay tuned.

-Will

WIP Wednesday:WIP Wednesday:WIP Wednesday:July 8, 2026July 8, 2026July 8, 2026

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Hey, everyone! I’m here tonight with a brand new installment of Work-In-Progress Wednesday! Today, we’ll be checking out a couple new features in Atmocopter since last time.

New Object: Propellervator

The propellervator is, as you’d expect, an elevator with propellers! If you look closely, you can see that it’s also an object partially using the terrain’s 3D effect and partially using 2D for the turbines in back. When the player hops aboard, control is taken away and Atmocopter automatically moves to the center of the propellervator. The device’s turbines spin up, and Atmocopter is quickly whisked away to another area! In the above GIF, you can also see updated transition effects since last time. The direction of the transition corresponds to the direction in which the player left the screen.

The propellervator is mostly a set piece for now, but it’s going to be useful in level design when I’d like to break up a level into a couple distinct parts. There’s also a double-size version of propellervator which I’m hoping to use in some auto-scrolling sections!

New Visual Effect: Glow Behind Clouds

This is something I’ve been meaning to do for a while! Certain objects hidden by clouds now “glow through” a little bit, showing a hint of what’s underneath. In the below screenshot, you can see a little of how it’s put together.

I used debug cheats to move next to the clouds and then fired Atmocopter’s eye beams, pushing the clouds away for a moment. You can see that the glow is only drawn over the clouds, and that underneath are deadly electraps!

Hit “Continue Reading” for more GIFs and screenshots!

Super Pixel Effects GigapackSuper Pixel Effects GigapackSuper Pixel Effects Gigapackv2.6.0v2.6.0v2.6.0

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Hey, everyone! I’m here today with Super Pixel Effects Gigapack version 2.6.0! Today is a big fireworks day here, so I have a fireworks and explosion-themed update for you:

We skipped Work-In-Progress Wednesday this week because I was super busy working on these and Atmocopter, so these animations are all brand new to you guys! I really tried to pull out all the stops and make them the best they could be.
Included are an epic explosion, two stylized explosions, and two different styles of fireworks. As always, all effects come in a large and small size, so you can pick out the right blast for your game! My favorite is the one with the lightning. It’s really dynamic!

Ready to get it for your game?

Not into Patreon? Never fear- The Gigapack can also be purchased below!

What’s Next?

I’ll be continuing Gigapack updates and working on Atmocopter throughout the month as I get the game ready for 2D Con in August. Here’s my tentative schedule for July:

Enjoy the fireworks tonight! (Or if you’re outside the US, enjoy the pixel fireworks!)
Zeph and I will be hunkering down and chilling tonight, since she’s a little scared of the big fireworks. We’ll have a fun night in together!

See you next week on Work-In-Progress Wednesday. I won’t miss the next one- Lots of progress to share on Atmocopter!

-Will