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Eggsecutioner

Posted: 18 September, 2026

Sorry, sorry, I've fallen out of the habit of blogging, again. That's the problem with being a part-time dev, there's always something that can get in the way...

Eggnob

But there's been progress!

• Restart Best's UI now shows each level, with the number of lives you had on your best run. This ended up being an almighty hack. The EH500's not built to support arbitrary images, and it has a pre-built structure about what constitutes a level, and what's torn down and brought up on entry & exit to each of them. So I had to write an offline parser to go through every level and compose a bespoke tilemap that it could be shown in this UI screen. But on the plus side, that made scrolling through each of the rooms trivial. That's one thing the engine was built for. ;D

• I've added a new leaderboard: Eggsecutioner, because, it dawned on me, most people will never complete a time trial run, so those leaderboards are gonna be pretty quiet. But, everyone's going to die. A lot. Eggsecutioner tracks total deaths, from every session, so whoever dies the most is gonna be at the top of the 'board. Which is fitting. Fuck that Egg. The whole point is to kill it.

• Gravity can flip. Cos of course it can. Not sure how often I'll use this, but it's nice to have in the ol' toolbox.

• There're springs! And they spring you.

• Joypad hotplug: this was actually a bug in the EH500, but it took me ages to work out. As with all things, was simple in the end: the engine wasn't looking out for joypad events during boot-up and the splash-screen, so if you picked up the pad as the game was launched, well, no pad for you. You'd have to cycle it...

• A load of QoL changes to the UI screens, mainly so you don't have to go back to the main menu to re-try a room if you Game Over in it. Stuff like that.

• I've rebalanced out a few of the levels. I was definitely playing it too much last month, but a couple of weeks away from it had dulled my skills enough to make me realise that a couple of the rooms were absolute cunts, so they've been smoothed out a little. I've also added a couple of early rooms to re-enforce the analogue jump, and the fart button.

I also noticed that there's a port of SDL3 to the Dreamcast. So, I thought I'd try it out. And guess what? Eggnob runs on the Dreamcast! Not in a frame, yet, but that'll be solvable once I pull my DC out of the cupboard and work out how to hook it up to a monitor. (There's also an SDL3 port for PS2, but as I don't have any hardware, I don't think I'll bother with that one. We'll see...) So, official Dreamcast version of Eggnob? Very very likely. I might see if I can get it on the Neo Geo, as well. No promises.

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