Hempuli's blog

Sectovember! Gotta love that month!!

To be honest, not too much has happened over the past three months. Mobile Suit Baba trudges ever onwards, Planet Keke has been on hold to give more time for the former, blah blah. The most significant change over here has been Vilma’s introducton to the ecosystem. This has gone mostly fine, I’d say.

I ran playtests of two more-than-2-player boardgames; one is a more eurogamey deal, while the other is a roll-and-write. Unsurprisingly the eurogame design didn’t work very well on the first playtest, while the RnW showed more promise. I’ve been excited abour Ledergames‘ Root again, and pondered about something inspired by it and My City.

I removed Elder Dance from Itch.io since it turned out that the design had some very glaring issues. I have an idea for how to address them now, but said ideas need more testing.

ESA 2 has also progressed at a ponderous but nonetheless existent pace. I’ll need to refactor the moving platform code sometime soon, and this prospect isn’t one I look forward to.

I decided to finally record a playthrough of the old 2006 demo of Spud’s Quest by Chris Davis. It’s a klik-based game that’s close to my heart and virtually impossible to find online anymore, and as such showcasing it to a larger crowd seemed like a fun idea. I’ll do a playthrough of the full game as well at some point.

Watch the Spud’s Quest demo playthrough here!

I really need to do these at the end of the month instead of during the next month, I have a lot of stuff from September I’d want to write about!!

Anyway – last month was mostly fairly uneventful. My game projects progressed, the solitaire collection got another new solitaire (not released yet), Planet Keke got its name and moved along at a slow-but-steady pace, same for Mobile Suit Baba & ESA2.

I’ve had a bunch of trouble lately concentrating on my game projects when not streaming. With this in mind the weekly streams have been excellent, but it has meant that I’ve only done work on my projects a couple hours every week, and that doesn’t quite cut it due to how slow everything progresses at the moment. I’ll need to figure out something there…

My favourite procrastination from videogame dev has become… boardgame dev! I designed about 3-ish new boardgames last month, one of which can be seen above. The design processes might spill a bit over to September, hard to remember. Anyway, I have 3 boardgames that I think are almost ready, but that need a final(?) looking-at, as well as writing out the final rules, before I’m happy putting them available. I removed Malsymmetric from my Itch.io listing because after some thought that one didn’t really feel solid enough. Maybe I should take another look at it…

What else… right, I set up the Mailchimp newsletter thing, and sent the first newsletter at the end of last month! That was exciting! I doubt I’ll have enough content for regular monthly messages, but maybe that’s a positive for most of the people receiving them; makes sense to only send out stuff when there’s something to actually say.

And finally: I graduated! For real this time! I’m now a Master of Psychology, and I also applied for and received official sanctioning so now I’m also a real, proper Psychologist. Nice! I’m planning to join some student events this autumn to get a final taste of university life as a way of saying farewell to that part of my life. I’ll also be drawing a final(?) comic & cover art piece to our student magazine.

I guess that’s it, mostly? As said, it’s hard to remember anymore exactly what took place in August and what’s already September material. Not that any of this really matters, haha.

First of all, I made another little comic!

Second of all, I went and updated the website so that there are no more imgur links in the game screenshots; I noticed that some of those links had died and it made sense to go for entirely local images. I should eventually also add local download links for those games that only offer an Itch.io link, I think. We’ll see. I also shuffled the games around a bit because I felt that some notably tiny games were in the “medium games” category and vice versa. Also some games graduated to the “big games” category! I should really rethink the category system altogether…

Third of all, the paper puzzle collection has been updated with the latest puzzle types like Equal measures and Diagaquarium.

Fourth of all – I made Masjin available again! The server’s still dead, but at least you can download the game (and the server hosting tool is likewise available again).

Fifth and final of all, have some screenshots of the games I’m working on:

Welp, ended up prototyping yet another boardgame. I think it needs more work but we’ll see how much once I get to actually playtesting it.

Also ESA2 has been progressing at a steady, if slow pace. Some pics:

I made a small abstract boardgame! It’s so small, in fact, that all the components fit in a normal playing card box:

I’ve accumulated a lot of boardgame components over the past ~2 years because I was playing more boardgames in general and got the itch to design my own. To a large extent buying components was one of those unhealthy “I can justify this as vaguely useful and it gives me happy feelings” shopping habit things; I have currently more various game pieces, coins and other such bits than I’d probably need. Not great, but ideally I’ll eventually utilize all those bits and pieces in one way or another.

Anyway!! I recently read the book Lautapelien Historia (translates to ‘History of Boardgames‘) by Ari Saastamoinen; it was fairly interesting, although fairly lopsided in favour of chess & go. The book concentrating on abstract games (combined with the aforementioned accumulation of boardgame components) made me want to design a simple abstract boardgame. I’m not a very skilled boardgame designed but crafting the board and pieces was fun. I’ll probably post the rules here once I’m happy with them.

In other news, I’ve been steadily working on several projects for the past months. ESA2 progresses at a fairly steady pace, while the Keke rocket game and the Into the Breach -esque puzzler have had some chugs in development, followed usually by bursts of activity. On top of these 3 there’s also a collection of solitaires I’ve been making in Löve2D, inspired, again, by the Zachtronics Solitaire Collection. Compared to the others, this game is a bit more limited in scope, and as such I managed to even put out a beta version with 8 solitaires included (including Babataire & Babataire EX, now with more appropriate names)! You can download that version on Itch.io.

The paper puzzle collection has been updated to version 1.1.7! This means the addition of Mark the spot & LITOS; sadly the former is a bit of a weak entry, but oh well.

Check the paper puzzle collection out!

In other news, have some GIFs of projects in development!

Ok! I’ve been promising a general “what’s going on” post for a while now, and I guess it’s time to write exactly that. When this year started, I had a couple specific plans for how I’d handle my game development throughout the year (and in some cases onwards from there):

• I intended to start a more structured weekly schedule, sleeping times included, in an effort to both differentiate my free and work time better and to get my terribly unstable daily rhythm under control.
• I planned to make a small game every month for a total of 12 small games, both as a way to try out this system I had first seen used by Petri Purho in… 2007, was it? and in order to take a mental break from Baba Is You and other large, multi-year projects that had been on my mind over the past years.

So how did all this turn out? Not very well. The structured schedule and the monthly game system both fell apart already in January. I couldn’t get myself to stay awake long enough if I woke up early, and preferred going to sleep when I felt tired, sleeping through the day and then being awake overnight. The first monthly game I had planned, a refined version of my earlier Ludum Dare #47 entry Keke’s Underwater Adventure, turned out to be way too large in scope (and most of the other ideas I had picked for monthly projects had the same issue, I suspect) and while I did get some stuff implemented, by the end of the month things were way too unfinished to call the result a success.

So yeah, not great. I don’t remember the exact order of events at this point, but I think I decided pretty quickly to try to make 12 small games over the year in total instead of trying to make one game every month. As for the weekly schedule, it seemed that since the issue was mostly feeling tired (and a decade of getting used to being a night owl), I was better off trying to live with it for the time being, especially because on top of tiredness I was noticing a slightly concerning lack of energy to make things. I did eat more than a half of a Carolina Reaper chili, though!

I had a plan for an April’s Fools game (two, in fact!) but the aforementioned lack of energy posed a fairly serious obstacle because I couldn’t muster the will to make either game happen on time. Luckily later in April I participated in Nordic Game Jam, which allowed me to actually finish a project, RUDE CHESS. I guess this triggered further productivity, because over the weeks following RUDE CHESS I managed to also finish It’s A Me, Baba Is You XTREME (one of the two April’s Fools games), Baba Friend and Keke in the Caves of Peril. Yay!

Before NGJ I started having constant restless leg syndrome, which further caused trouble with sleeping and keeping my daily rhythm straight. I often had to tire myself to get any sleep at all, and after the above burst of productivity, over the Summer I fell into a serious lull in motivation, resulting in me stopping bi-weekly gamedev streams and not really feeling like working on games at all for ~3 months. Ugh!!! I did manage to do some paper puzzle design and comics drawing in the meantime, but something was seriously not right.

October drawing close, I was contacted about a plan to make a small bundle of Halloween-themed games. This seemed like a potentially good way to get back on track gamedev-wise and I agreed, deciding on a whim on my game idea (or maybe it was more than a whim, I can’t remember. I think I had come up with the idea slightly before and decided to use it because it seemed funny?) Around this time I also had some blood tests taken and it turned out that I had a serious iron deficiency both in terms of hemoglobin and body iron reserves. And would you believe it, this turned out to have been the issue all along: getting some extra iron gave me motivation & energy back, and the restless leg syndrome went away, too! What’s funnier, a friend had recommended having my iron levels checked just before this (advice which I didn’t heed). Lesson of this story is: don’t get iron deficiency.

With the iron issue sorted out, I managed to finish The Plumber Thing, and this then led into a bunch of unrelated small games: Mamono Mower, Cavern Sweeper, Babataire, Babataire EX, a rerelease of Cavern of Flight, a rerelease & update of Once in Space, a holiday update to The Plumber Thing, some paper puzzles and finally It’s A Block-Pushing Game, fulfilling the goal of the year (or not, depending if the rereleases count). Overall I’m really happy with this year’s productivity, which is a bit surprising considering the iron deficiency. I also recorded a playthrough of a game I liked as a child, Lost Valley.

There are a couple things that were left somewhat or entirely unfulfilled over the year:

• Most of the games I did end up making weren’t part of the original list of monthly games. As stated, most of those were too scope-creepy for this project, but nonetheless.
• My sleep schedule is still mostly terrible, and I didn’t get enough exercise this year, spending most of the time sitting at my computer.
• I didn’t paint almost at all! And I mostly drew just the usual 4 comics I make annually for the student magazine. I mean, that’s definitely something, but I’d want to do some watercolours again.

And now, what’s planned for the next year?

• I’ll keep making some smaller games, although this time without an explicit count I’d aim for. There are a couple ideas I think I should be able to get done with semi-limited trouble, so hopefully at least some of those can become reality.
• It has started to feel that working on ESA2 might actually be fun again. Maybe? We’ll see! I’ll try to make ESA2 my main project next year, and actually get that thing somewhere instead of it staying forever in a limbo of sorts.
• The weekly streams will return; hopefully this time I won’t lose steam halfway through.
• I think it’s time to move on from Baba Is You, at least for the time being. Next April I’d have spent about 6 years of my life around Baba, and while it’s been largely an enjoyable ride (and I do have Baba-related ideas for the future, about which I’ll post when they’re ready to be revealed), it’d be nice to feel that the game as it is now is more or less a “finished” product. Note that this doesn’t mean that I won’t do anything more with/to BIY, but rather that I’d wish to mentally move on from the game and get the feeling that it’s where I want it to be.
• My internal deadline for getting my master’s degree in Psychology has been set to the beginning of April. There’s so little left!
• I’ll try to exercise more.

Here’s a list of the games released this year, alongside the source of inspiration for them (if I can remember it):

1. RUDE CHESS (A combination of pondering about randomness as a puzzle mechanic and my earlier No More Sweden 2018 entry, Chnakess)
2. It’s A Me! (A joke I made in AuthorBlues‘ Twitch stream chat and then realized sounded actually funny)
3. Keke in the Caves of Peril (My entry for Ludum Dare #48 finished and polished)
4. Baba Is You XTREME (Idea for an Aprils’ Fools version of Baba Is You)
5. Baba Friend (Based on that old desktop sheep toy, I’ve wanted to make one of these since forever)
6. The Plumber Thing (Can’t remember the exact thought process leading to it)
7. Mamono Mower (Exuno, Goost & Maurice from the Mystery Tournament community joked about odd combos of genres + the community has an inside joke about Lawn Mower, a NES game. Heavy inspiration from Mamono Sweeper)
8. Cavern of Flight rerelease (A 2016 Ludum Dare entry, which I edited slightly to remove some game-breaking bugs and rough edges)
9. Once in Space 2022 (Updated version of Once in Space from 2011, which in turn was a remake of Once in Space from 2007)
10. Babataire (An idea borne out of Cluj solitaire, which I saw in the Zachtronics Solitaire Collection)
11. Cavern Sweeper (A separate concept for Mamono Mower that I wanted to explore but removed from the lawn-mowing theme)
12. Babataire EX (A serious attempt to combine Baba Is You and solitaire)
13. It’s A Block-Pushing Game (Possibly started as a chess-themed sokoban idea? Can’t quite recall)

Maybe that’s enough of that?

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!

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.