Archive for the ‘Baba Is You’ Category.
More streaming! I really need to set up my standing desk again, these past days have caused stomach pains possibly partially because of all the sitting.
I managed to fix a whole bunch of small issues and add handy hotkeys and other quality-of-life features for the editor. The editor is actually starting to feel pretty nice to use, I’d say, and that’s exciting! I also added the train sprite above; not sure why, exactly, but it felt fitting.
Took a bit of a break from streaming! Got back to it a week or so ago, although I’ve still been somewhat low on energy. Today I did a longer 6-hour stream and got a lot of stuff done in Baba, including the above word “Feeling”, some additions to the object colouring system, bugfixes, and more. There was a nicely active set of viewers throughout and that helped a lot with motivation, too!
A couple streams have gone by without me having the energy to make a blogpost. Anyway, here we are again!
ESA2 hasn’t been progressing quite as swiftly as one could hope, but the basic framework is looking very promising. I’ve added some of the first enemies as seen above, started implementing the map and in general tried to keep everything going despite lapses in progress.
News on Baba Is You follow a very similar pattern – the level editor is getting close to being feature-complete apart from a couple potentially-extremely-troublesome features. The annoying thing is that most of the level editor work isn’t very screenshot-able! I’ll have to be happy that I have ESA2 to showcase instead. I did add a new word, Nudge, and make a gif of it, though:
Also! Baba Is You won the Best Design and Innovation awards at the Game Developers Choice Awards, at which I would have been weren’t it for the looming threat of COVID-19. The talk I was going to give about Baba’s rule system was also broadcasted as a “virtual talk”, so that’s neat. Baba also received the Outstanding Game Design award at the D.I.C.E Game Awards, cool stuff! Soon there’ll be the BAFTA awards, let’s see if Baba can keep it up with people appreciating its design.
– German translation added!
– The Portuguese translation had some English bits due to a mistake by me; this has now been fixed. Apologies.
– The level selector turned invisible at odd points when beating a level
– In certain languages the post-victory “congratulations” -text had the letters too close to each other
– The displayed a mysterious error in certain cases when watching the intro cinematic
– There’s now a clearer distinction between Portuguese and Brazilian Portuguese in the translations.
– Fixed a bug that caused the language menu to break on gamepads after changing language
– Fixed a bug where watching the intro cinematic broke save data
– Small errors in a couple translations were ironed out
Level adjustments:
– Platformer (found in Rocket Trip; the old level was very fiddly)
Monday, so another stream! I was quite tired at first but things got going anyway. It feels like I didn’t work on any single more important issue, but there was a lot of smaller polishing/reworking/bugfixing done on Baba, and ESA 2 got some new basic tiles to decorate the first area, seen above. I meant to create some new enemies for ESA 2, but Baba’s workload & my baseline tiredness were too much. As a nice thing, the ESA 2 menu things I *checks* did mention in the previous post got implemented fairly painlessly. Time to get that pause menu rolling!
Today was more of a Baba stream than an ESA 2 stream; I implemented some missing features for the new editor along with the Seldom and Often words seen above. I’ll soon get to the point where I need to start considering how to add gamepad controls for the editor, and wow will that be a tough job.
On ESA 2’s side, I mostly worked on the pause menu layout and drew some new tiles for the first area. I was going to implement more of the menu, but realized that I do want to handle certain menu-related code properly from the get-go instead of using hackier solutions, and shied away.
The bestiary(‘s skeleton) is back! And this time I could even reuse the old assets for it, yay. I meant to work a bit on the pause menu on today’s stream, but got scared away by how hairy certain text-rendering issues were.
In Baba Is You, I fixed some lagginess and implemented a system where the player needs to play through their level in order to upload it. Working on the editor is generally exhausting but today was a pretty productive day in that regard.
This week I officially started a Monday/Thursday streaming schedule; we’ll see how that goes. The first stream of this glorious new era was late but went fairly well. In ESA 2, I worked on boss-related basic functionality such as the boss HP bar, as well as some powerup/weapon-related systems. In Baba Is You, I trudged onwards on the nigh-endless road that hopefully leads us to a nice, functional level editor. Apart from the size-changing stuff, all buttons seen in the image above actually do what they’re meant to now, which is great!
More streaming, more ESA2 and Baba! Baba Is You’s still in the endless swamp of level editor work; as the editor gets more complex, working on it also gets more arduous and scary. However, I’ll soon be at the stage to technically try to implement the actual online functionality! That’ll be scary in its own way, but fairly exciting as well!
On ESA 2’s side, I’ve kept adding more basic features; today’s stream included the conveyor belts, bounce shots and coloured shots seen above. I also did some tileset tests last stream and I think I’m finally starting to feel OK about the colours and visual look of the game. That’s a huge relief.
Today saw another stream! This time I managed to actually work a bit more diligently on ESA 2. I implemented a bunch of powerups and added powerup collection flags to all of the ones currently implemented, and worked a bit on the editor. One of my goals was to get editing the parallax layers working properly, but that turned out to be very very nasty so I left it for later.
I also worked a bit on Baba Is You; the “themes” as they’re called have been the object of interest for a bit now, and I continued making the work. I’m really proud of how handy the menu system of Baba’s is; my earlier games have had very clunky and manually-coded menus and Baba’s more dynamic affair makes the level editor *way* easier to structure. I shied away from the nastiest bit of theme work, though; hopefully it won’t take too long to get to that.