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!
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.
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.
I streamed today, after a week or so of not getting much done game development-wise. Phew! Baba got some work done on the editor; it’s coming together and even though there’s still lots to do, I realized that I’m possibly closer to being done than I previously thought. That’s encouraging!
On ESA 2’s side, I worked further on making the level editor work in a zoomed-in mode, to make dealing with small tiles nicer. I also shrunk the in-game font and HUD elements to have them not fill the game window as much. All in all, small things but progress nonetheless!
The image above is pretty terrible, all things considered, but I’m feeling a bit more hopeful about the future of ESA 2 at this point. I decided to turn back to 8×8 tiling again, after years of work with 12×12 tiling; this’ll hopefully make progress faster (once I figure the colours out) and help alleviate my disappointment with the visual style of the game. Now just to get everything working on this new, lower resolution, and we should be good to go ahead (finally!)
