Hempuli's blog

Hi everyone! My internship is now over and while I haven’t graduated, a big step on my way into psychologisthood has now been taken.

Anyway, I didn’t manage to write much of anything here during the internship, but near the end of the year I started making some plans on what I’d like to change in my life for 2022, and I thought it’d make sense to share some of those plans, insofar as they relate to game development. Most of this is copy-pasted from my personal Discord server, but whatever.

I’ve noted that a big problem for my work & everyday life is how difficult it usually is to differentiate between work and non-work, especially on the internet. In order to improve on this, I’ll try to follow a slightly stricter schedule this year in terms of when I do what. I drafted a tentative sketch for what my workweek might look like:

Mon-Wed: Work on ESA2 and other non-Baba game projects
Wed: Stream 1 – work on ESA2 and other non-Baba game projects
Thur-Fri: Work on Baba Is You
Fri: Stream 2 – work on Baba Is You
Sat-Sun: Time off; I probably won’t be able to keep my mind off videogames so I won’t pretend that I wouldn’t do any game work here, but I’ll try to keep it very relaxed and non-work-like.

I might on some weeks switch the days around or make other changes, stream more often and so on, but it’d be nice to have a general guideline to follow that I can refer to when pondering what to do on a given day and how to spend my days.

Relating to the “other non-Baba game projects”, I have a largeish plan for 2022 that’ll be the other major non-Baba thing alongside ESA2: I want to make a small game every month this year! The idea would be that I take one idea that I’ve pondered about but not implemented and make a prototype out of it, 12 times over the year. However, my goal would be to actually have something playable, not just a rough proof-of-concept. I’m pretty excited about this concept! I might use a format similar to what Petri Purho used during the year that gave us Crayon Physics, in that even though I’ll make a game every month, I’ll only work 7 days maximum on a given game. We’ll see!

Oh yeah, also Baba Is You got its major update, Baba Make Level, last November! Kind of embarrassing that I wrote nothing about it here, but as I said in some previous post, I’ll try to get a round-up “what’s cooking” post done sometime and address all the little things I haven’t mentioned here there and then.

Happy new year!

Would you look at that, here we go again! Jack Lance from the puzzle game Discord server had pointed out that the Shared field puzzle type could be more interesting if the fields couldn’t contain other letters than the ones designated for them. I didn’t initially like this idea too much, but I guess it stuck in my mind because I later came up with the concept of adding diagonal lines to the mix to allow for more varied field shapes (probably inspiration came from Portponky‘s Subway puzzle type!)

The format isn’t maybe visually my favourite, but people have commented on it positively and I’m very happy about that!

Ever since I got introduced to Tapa and other paper puzzles last Summer/Spring, I’ve every now and then played some on the puzz.link website and in general been intrigued by them. I can recommend the puzzle types called Tapa, LITS & Akari. As is usual for me, I wanted to try creating my own paper puzzle variant; I picked a fairly obvious set of rules close to those of Tapas & Nurikabes and the end result is something I called “Somethingapa” because I didn’t know what to call it. Rules below:

I showed my invention to a community of puzzle game developers and Deusovi kindly informed me that this set of rules had already been invented in the form of the Canal View paper puzzle. Oh well! I had good fun and got inspiration for some other things, plus managed to create a simple paper puzzle designer program in Löve2D, so all in all it was an enjoyable endeavour! (And obviously feeling sad that someone had already come up with the same idea is somewhat silly but I can’t entirely help it.) Here are two more example puzzles:

Hi! A bunch of people had requested a link to the new Discord; sorry about replying so slowly. Here’s a 10-person invite:

Link To Discord

Hey! I actually managed to stream on two consecutive weeks! Maybe this is a sign of a brighter future.

I set up a Discord yesterday, comment below if you want a link to it I guess.

Today’s stream was somewhat slow but I still got some handy stuff implemented. I worked on some more map stuff on Baba, and while the map’s low FPS annoys me a lot, the actual thing I set out to do seemed to work! I also started implementing two other things but hesitated because I realized I want to keep the secret.

I also worked on the penguin thing, although admittedly I made less progress than I originally intended. Walljumping was added along with some new assets, but there are some structures that I need to implement soon to get forward with the project.

I think a result of setting up the Discord was there being more people on the stream – there was some nice discussion! Thank you very much for that. :)