Aloha!

If you missed my last post on platforms in beatemups, go check it out, I'm proud of it!

https://bomtoons.newgrounds.com/news/post/1605747

It's been a while, sorry for the lack of updates, my day job has been killing me due to our busy season and constant emergencies, long hours, and late nights. 😔

I do have some cool stuff going on though, one secret project that I hope to be able to share more details on soon...

But for today, I'll update you on

Chibi Knight Plus

(AKA: Chibi Knight Demastered)

It's a re-master from the ground up, of the original Chibi Knight! (play it here on Newgrounds).

All new code, all new art, full HD screen size with controller support and available on Steam!

It won't cost much and will even have some new enemies and quests added above and beyond the original game.

@Luis is doing art and animation in his patented chunky pixel style and I must say it's looking luscious!

Here are some screenshots:

The Steam page for wishlists is not quite ready, but you can wishlist the companion games on Steam:

Chibi Knight Classic

Super Chibi Knight

Idle Chibi Knight

In other news, I missed the Flash Forward Jam this year sadly. I usually like to do SOMETHING for this occasion, but I was just stretched too thin this year... oh well, gonna try to contribute to the judging at least.

In other news, I promised in this post's title something about AI. Well, as much as everyone in the art world hates it, I'm pretty much forced to use it at my day job for coding and... honestly, it's incredible!

I'm in awe pretty much every day at what it can do. I've been using Claude Code with various "agentic" workflows and it's astounding. Basically, the models that dropped at the beginning of February made this something that was "fun to play with and help out occasionally" to now: "You have to be using this in software engineering or you will be left behind."

I must admit that the prospect of it becoming so capable that fewer and fewer engineers are necessary is real and scary, so my approach has been to learn, full force, how to wield it and keep myself useful.

At my work, already, I threw it at 2 big problems that we've been struggling with for a long time and many engineers have tried solving, and it knocked both of them out of the park in a matter of hours (with my human direction, critique, and guidance, of course... but still...)

AI is a real revolution in software engineering/coding. There's no doubt about that. We'll see now how it impacts other industries over the next few years as more people become comfortable with it and effective workflows/tools become more standardized. It's exciting and scary, but we're living through a major tech shift right now, akin to electricity, telephones, and the Internet (IMO). It's kinda fun, for me, to be working somewhere that I'm on the leading edge of using it.

The main benefit I've seen, besides its reliability to write syntactically perfect code and to reason through disparate code bases intelligently, is that I, as the engineer, have been freed up to worry about more abstract and strategic problems... like: "With this power, what's the BEST thing I can point it at to move the needle for the company/team?"

IMO, the skills that will matter long-term in software engineering will be those "softer" skills now... more critical thinking, entrepreneurial spirit, identifying the right problem(s) to solve, creativity, etc. AI will greatly democratize software creation which means a lot more slop, for sure, but also a lot more power into the hands of people who would never have dreamed they could "make an app."

I also predict that "integration consultants" are going to make a killing in the short term. Right now, no one, except code nerds, knows how powerful AI is... every industry is going to need guides/sherpas to help them catch the vision of what is possible with AI and the people who sell that "integration" service are going to clean up.

Leave me your thoughts on Chibi Knight Plus and AI!