Hempuli's blog

Changelog:
– Removed some unfinished translations from the game files until they’re more complete
– New level in Familiar Lands!
– Fixed | not showing in the hand-drawn font
– Fixed a small visual glitch in the main game
– Fixed a recursive submenu bug
– Fix to a cornercase where Fear would cause an object to move in a buggy way
– Fixed Power not working with Level
– Added support for multiple Power/Powered words
– Fixed Seeing and Power not working together
– Fixed lua errors with Baba and Play
– Fixed broken Play notes
– Fixed some language file quirks
– You can now see the level code in the pause menu
– You can now see the level code when browsing the “Play Custom Levels” menu
– New level in Land of Vehicles
– Fixed a bug where the quickbar could have non-existent objects
– You can now enter level codes without the hyphen and the game will add it automatically
– Level Is Chill works now
– * added to the in-game font
– Fixed level numbering in Starry Lands
– The way conditionals are handled in the code was reworked heavily
– Fixed “Baba Play Not A” not disabling “Baba Play A”
– The pause menu buttons should now stretch horizontally if needed
– Added Cheese, Chair, Bomb & Table
– Fixed Level not working with multiple conditionals
– Fixed objects blinking annoyingly in 3D
– Fixed an Empty & Chill interaction
– Fixed an Empty & Facing interaction
– Fixed a bug where Empty Is Move would make Empty move randomly even when it shouldn’t
– Implemented some stuff for displaying Thai
– New level in Land of Oddities
– Implemented an optimization for Power/Powered that should speed them up a lot
– Another new level in Land of Oddities (thanks to Misshapensmiley for showing this variant idea!)
– A large optimization to sentences placed next to each other; something like “Baba Is You Rock Is Push” now separates the two rules earlier in the parsing process to prevent unnecessary processing
– Fixed a buggy interaction between Word & Feeling (potentially also Powered)
– Fixed Pull breaking if you pull more than 2 objects more than one tile at a time
– Added a drop shadow for signpost text
– Fixed a bug where Still objects could be Swapped in certain circumstances
– Fixed a bug where text stacked with letters could break rule parsing
– Fixed a bug where the outcome of a Powered condition check could be affected by particle effects
– Fixed signposts losing their text after being destroyed
– Fixed Not Without working differently from how it used to in how it handles multiple parameters
– Added some missing translations
– Fixed some oversights with word-wrapping

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!

The Switch patch is finally here! Huge apologies for things taking this long, there were some unexpected bumps on the way. The current version has some issues with a couple of the supported languages, and we’ll be running another patch soon to rectify that. Thank you for your support and patience!

Changelog:

• Fixed a bug with the map music in the new maps
• Added 10 levels to New Adventures
• Added 4 levels to Museum
• Fixes to the Polish translation
• Fixed a bug that could send you to the wrong level
• Fixed a crash in the Switch level editor
• The game now tracks levels you’ve downloaded and solved! If you delete and download the same level, the game should still show your past completion in the “Featured Levels” & “Play Levels” menus (doesn’t work retroactively, sorry)
• Fixed an issue where certain uppercase symbols could break the hand-drawn font
• Added several missing translation lines in. Sorry about that!
• Renamed certain levels with placeholder names
• Reworked the way Revert works; it should now be more optimized and not bug as easily

Levels adjusted:

• Written In Stone (was previously impossible, apologies)
• Skull Pile (was previously impossible, apologies)
• Teamwork Is A Must (was previously impossible, apologies)
• New Adventures!
• Seeing B
• Land of Oddities
• Baba Is Empty
• Experiment
• Land Land Land
• Hangar
• Land of Vehicles
• Ventilation Shaft
• Skygate
• Spaceport
• Rapid Growth
• Sturdy Flowers
• Safety Vest
• Tangled Passage
• Waiting For You
• Feeling Dangerous
• Dangerous Feeling
• Secret Clearing
• Garden? What Garden?
• House House
• Haunted Spa (thanks to Axerity for the fix!)
• Blow The Candles Out
• Parakeet Bouncer
• Antigravity
• Pushing Uphill
• Happy Dance
• Harvest Party
• Gone Fishing
• Sun Boulevard
• Milky Way
• Set The Stage
• Fragile Existence – Old (major fix)
• More Unused Levels (big adjustment)
• Train
• Train 2
• Land of Delicacies
• Appetizer
• Sideways Fireplace
• Private Garden
• Safety Box
• Safety Box 2
• Moonrise, Sunset
• More Unused Levels
• Turmoil In The Clouds (major fix)
• Treasure Chest
• Set The Stage
• Quarters
• Experiment
• Ventilation Shaft
• Cloud Apartment
• Baba Fields
• Outreach (full redesign)
• Shiny Ladder
• Hidden Blueprints
• There And Back
• Smelting Facility (thanks to Axerity for suggestions!)
• Exclusive Membership
• Once More With Feeling!
• Where Am I Going?
• Seeing A
• Fertile Ground
• Supply Route
• Planet Baba
• Destructive Presence
• ABAB CD EFG
• Baba Needs Friends
• Keke The Guard
• Seasons

Ok! The online level-sharing is out in public beta!

As mentioned earlier, I wanted to test a method to let people outside of Steam to also be able to check out the open beta. And now there’s a way to do exactly that! Just head to itch.io and pick up the limited-time editor build; it will only be kept up-to-date until the editor releases and has some limited utilities, but it’ll let you experience the full extent of the level-sharing beta! I understand that is still not quite comparable to being able to test the editor on a Switch, but as I said earlier, that is not entirely something I could make happen. I hope people will find this method acceptable. Thanks for your support!

You can also read the Steam announcement here.

One more thing: I set up a Twitter account for gathering level codes of levels that people found cool or interesting. Do tweet at @BabaLevels if you feel you’ve found such a level! This’ll make picking the featured levels easier in the future as well.

Things have taken longer than intended, as they tend to do, but we’re almost there! In fact enough there to start publicly testing the beta! Specifically, the “open beta” bit concerns the online level-sharing feature, that has so far been off-limits outside of the closed testing group.

Since this is the first time we’re setting up something like this and we want to get an idea of how much there is to worry about and what kind of troubles and such we’ll need to prepare for, the level-sharing is quite rudimentary initially. The way it’ll work for now is:

• When you upload a level, you get a 9-symbol level code (in the format XXXX-YYYY) that others can use to download your level.
• The game contains a “featured levels” list that we’ll update every now and then by hand with new interesting levels.
• When playing a level, you can at any time report it in the pause menu. Please do this if the level contains offensive things or is otherwise thematically unpleasant.

The main way to access these features is via the Steam beta branch system; a lot of Steam players have been able to check out the progress of the editor over the past months already, albeit without the level-sharing.

Now then, I’ve felt very bad about the fact that people not on Steam haven’t been able to access the beta; it’s especially unfortunate for Nintendo Switch™ users, since they’ve had to wait the longest for updates in general. Due to this, here’s how I plan to go forward:

• The update will go live on Sunday (Dec 13th) or Monday (Dec 14th), most likely. There are still some final things to be handled (although the editor will still be slightly unfinished even when the level-sharing goes live – there will be translations & music missing, among other things), and I will try to get those sorted out this weekend.
• I have an idea that I want to try to possibly offer limited access to the beta editor for those not on Steam. This might not work, so I won’t promise that it will be a thing yet, but I will investigate the possibility and share news on it when it either becomes apparent that it could never work or that it’s feasible. Apologies, but there are factors here that are beyond my ability to affect.
• The beta won’t include the new upcoming levelpacks, as those need some more work and assets.
• The beta will be available throughout December; the actual update unfortunately probably won’t be released in 2020 after all, since even if everything went swimmingly, there are some necessary procedures we have to go through that take time. Sorry about that. Once we know for sure when everything will be done, I’ll make a cool trailer and set a release date. Apologies for missing the planned date, but I hope this public beta alleviates things somewhat.

Finally, thanks to all of you for your amazing support and kindness towards the project over the years! I really want to offer all of you some neat extra content and hope that the editor works and is fun to use. I also think that Baba & friends will appear in some future games, although nothing is set in stone regarding that.

Baba is still coming along; a lot has happened in terms of e.g. bugs being fixed and so on, but at the same time those large milestones of 1) finishing the editor and 2) finishing the upcoming extra levelpacks are still yet to be achieved. But we go forward, and lately I’ve streamed more often and that has been very helpful for progress.

Baba Is You was speedrun by Succinct_and_Punchy at the Games Done Quick online event last week, 21st of August. It was really cool! People seemed to be very excited about the run and in general were extremely supportive. Thank you!

As seen above, among other changes I’ve added two new characters to the game: Fofo and Jiji. I feel that one more character might be warranted but I’m quite happy about these two for now.

Inspired by Baba Is You and Zachtronics games, I decided to spend my Saturday evening and the following night implementing a simple, silly scripting language, with a twist! Which is that the code can turn in 90 degree angles. It was a lot of fun to make and I might try to prototype some kind of a small game around it, but for now it’s just a funny little toy.

I streamed Baba Is You development to see if I still feel. The editor trudges onward, and during this stream I implemented a bunch of polishing touches and fixed many smaller bugs. It’s a terrible never-ending swamp of things to do but at the same time I feel like we’re reasonably close.

I was planning to stream ESA 2 as well, but wanted to keep the stream reasonably short and ended up not doing that after all.

One thing I need to concentrate on sometime soon is work on the two new levelpacks that’ll be released with the editor; I’ve been keeping them on hold for a couple months now and especially the “New Adventures” pack is lagging behind pretty badly by now. Similarly, I’d like to get at least 2 more tunes done for Baba and those take time to get going; I hope I can get them implemented in time.

Streamed some 5 hours tonight, fixing a whole bunch of issues in Baba Is You, but also taking the time to implement a bit of stuff for ESA 2 as well! I’m trying to avoid the issue I ran into previously where my enemy designs are overly complicated and all-purpose and as a result the level design becomes difficult. I’m still kind of learning the scale of the new 8×8 tile size – I haven’t fully internalized how high the player can jump and seeing which passages will feel too cramped and which in turn are too open is tough. Still, progress is progress!

I made a whole bunch of Pride flags in Baba Is You! If you’re interested, you can see & download them here (imgur album)!

Baba Is You is also part of the Humble Fight for Racial Injustice Bundle, along with games such as Spelunky, FTL and Hyper Light Drifter! Click the image below to check it out :)