Posted February 17, 2026 by posshydra
hi, its austin!
here's another slightly delayed weekly update on the game.
when working on checkmage, i try to focus on the parts of the game i feel passionate about working on. there are pros and cons to this approach. i am able to have a lot of fun whenever i'm working on the game, however, sections that must get done are sometimes pushed aside for later.
pushing difficult tasks off isn't always bad. i have a habit of setting aside difficult problems in development and coming back to them later, refreshed and with a new perspective. this happens at all levels of development for me, from coding problems to level design to dialog and art.
i think this works, but at some point the circle has to close, and i have to revisit partially complete scraps i began months ago and take them to the finish line.
i had posted about these panel games in a previous blog, but they were kind of vestigial and out of place. much of the time i spent this week was spent connecting the panel puzzles and other interactive elements to the levels they were placed in. with that came a lot of level design and small things to polish.
as i get more proficient with using godot, ive started to find creative ways to use the tools it lends me. the scrolling background in this gif is a texture on a parallax layer that i change the offset of whenever the gears are turned. i only got the idea to do this after working with the parallax layers in the previous blogpost.
i think i'm very happy with how easy it is to work with godot and gdscript, here is the code that runs when the gears rotate.
broken down into words, all i have to ask it to do is:
1.get all gear sprites & make them play their animation
2. run the function i made that shakes the screen
3. make a "tween" (an object that godot provides to interpolate values) & use it to interpolate the texture offset of the background image, tweaked to have some easing in and out.
4. wait for it to finish, then return to doing whatever else
and finally, work is going into another one of the overworld puzzles i wanted to include.
this is probably familiar to some people. its like a slide puzzle, but you get to move sliding tiles in directions based on chess pieces! it's a lot of fun to play around with.
using godot's tilemap and a collection of scenes, i'm able to make these dynamically. this makes it a lot faster to workshop the puzzles and include new mechanics if i feel inclined to do so.
Checkmage! is still in active development. If you want to support me, please consider sharing with friends. The game will be released on Steam and Itch for sale when I'm done making it.
Checkmage! on Steam - play the demo now!
Bluesky - more updates, videos and sneak peeks