In January, this year, the Custom Gauntlet didn't exist. It wouldn't be done until about 4 weeks before launch, at which point all development focus had to shift over to fixing bugs.

Why so late to add it?

Well, it wasn't really in the development plans for the game at first. But to justify a $15 price tag, I knew I had to add a little bit more content to the game. But it took a while before it hit me what I should do:

Make a mode which combines boss rush modes where you fight bosses all in a row without healing between them with the ability to customize the difficulty of each individual boss fight, including the ability to outright remove bosses, then make new bosses using old sprites specifically for that mode.

And thus, the Custom Gauntlet was born. I set to work on the menu mechanics first, since I had a feeling that would be one of the harder parts. As soon as that was done, I started borrowing code from existing bosses for attacks, then using CF2.5+'s new sub-events feature to add in new stuff at higher difficulty settings more easily.

Then the fun part began and I started making almost entirely new fights that didn't re-use much existing code at all. CF2.5+'s sub-events feature sped things up a ton over vanilla CF2.5, I was actually rather impressed by how fast I was able to finish up the Custom Gauntlet's 12 bosses.

And so the new feature was done and I could move on to fixing up bugs and whatnot. A few balance tweaks were made to the Custom Gauntlet here and there, and here we are now with what's in the final version of the game.

I think that's all for this article, I hope you're enjoying the game!