Hempuli's blog

Another stream where I worked on three different games! ESA got a much-needed little fix, ESA 2 went forward some and Baba saw a couple bugfixes as well. I also implemented a system that makes it easier to understand what’s happening when an object tries to move but is immediately returned to its origin, as seen above.

There’s so much stuff to do! I had a vacation of sorts last week but had to spend it preparing for an exam – another week would’ve been very much welcome. As it is, progress on these various projects is ponderous but at least I haven’t burned out.

I’ve been playing Cultist Simulator again, and combined with Sunless Skies I’m feeling a foolish urge to try to make something story-driven. I don’t think I’d actually be able to make anything sensible story-wise, though.

Whoa, would you look at that! I managed to update Environmental Station Alpha! There were some features that I had semi-promised to implement + bugs introduced in the previous update that I wanted to get rid of, so here we went. I streamed the process, since streaming is often a force that enables me to finish these kinds of tasks.

You can find the details here: https://steamcommunity.com/gid/103582791437735114/announcements/detail/1603756162536029681

UGhghg, even when disregarding the sloppy weekly progress updates, I’ve been extremely bad at keeping this blog up to date with things I’ve been doing! Let’s try to fix that! Here’re some things I’ve made during the past several months:

– I made a game for Ludum Dare 41! It’s called Super Metabolism Bros, and it’s a kind of a mix of Dwarf Fortress -like real-time strategy with autonomous agents and platforming. The idea ended up being very rough and buggy, but it was a fun little thing and part of my long-enduring fascination with autonomous agents in games and pathfinding. FrankieSmileShow played the game on-stream and it was a fun time. I had a lot more plans (bacteria, at least) but didn’t have time for those.

– I had my 2-week Summer holiday a week ago, and during it I toyed around with shaders to create this fake 3D effect. It’s very satisfying to create this kind of stuff, although whether it’ll become anything or not will have to be seen. It’d be neat to make a cardgame or a boardgame with this style! (Alexis Kennedy’s Cultist Simulator definitely inspired me a lot)

– Stumblehill is done! It was featured as a part of Humble Bundle’s Monthly Bundle for July. There were some bugs at launch but they should be gone now, although I do plan to update the game a bit more before I call it fully finished. All in all, the project was fun and while I left things very much too late, the result turned out to be fairly neat. This also helped me a lot to get a feel for digital painting, although digital animation is something that feels way beyond me. Massive thanks to Anna Magdalino for the audio and Lucy Green for the writing!

– After a lengthy break, I’ve returned to work on ESA 2! However, because of various reasons I’ve decided to re-do the game from nearly scratch. I’m going to reuse assets where I can, but it’s still a bunch of work. Sorry about that! But I think the game will benefit from rethought. I’m currently setting up the editor and basics of the engine, but it shouldn’t be too long until I’ll be able to get to work on the actual map again.

– Also, I’ve finally updated ESA 1! Some bugs have been fixed, you can now skip the end credits if you’ve seen them already, and there have been some optimizations to the level loading times that should help especially older computers to handle the game. Many of these little changes have been made with speedrunners in mind.

– Baba Is You progresses onwards, somewhat slower now but nevertheless. I think I’ll do a separate post of interesting Baba gifs and whatnot in the future, but not mentioning it in this general update would be odd. On the video you can heard some tracks I’ve composed for the game.

I’ll also be participating in the No More Sweden game jam again this year. It’ll be held in the beginning of August in Malmö, Sweden. It’ll be good to meet some friends and maybe make some jam games. :)

(Cool photo & cool cake by my girlfriend, Anni :3)

Nordic Game Jam 2017 was last weekend, and I ended up winning it with my game, Baba Is You!

I went in not really expecting much; I wasn’t initially really in the mood for making new games so the plan was to kinda feel the situation and possibly just work on ESA 2 and/or Snake Game. The theme of the jam was “Not There”, and at some point it got me thinking about “not” as an operator in programming/logic. This in turn made me think of a puzzle game where the game logic is part of the game world, and eventually this idea turned into my entry. I was expecting to run to some really hairy coding problems and not be able to finish, but hey, that very much didn’t happen!

I’m not totally sure where to take the game from here; during the event my plan was to polish it a bit and release it mostly as-is, but since people really liked it and it even raised some philosophical considerations in some players, I think I’ll be working on it further.

Download the game on itch.io!

In other news, Environmental Station Alpha’s second anniversary was also last weekend, and I almost completely forgot to announce the sale that went with that. Oh well! Let’s hope we won’t get to its 3rd anniversary before ESA 2 is done.

Next up in the indie gamedev event schedule will be No More Sweden in June; we’ll see what happens there :O

Woop! Environmental Station Alpha is featured in the Humble Clickteam Fusion Bundle which is going on right now! Go check the bundle out, there are really cool games and tools in there:

Happy first birthday of Environmental Station Alpha! To celebrate, the game’s 50% off on Steam & Humble Store for this weekend, and the OST has a 33% discount too!

GAME HERE

Well then! It’s the end of the year, as well as the beginning of the 7th year of my blog! Wow, I actually hadn’t ever counted how long the blog has been around, but that’s pretty cool, I’d say. Lots of stuff has happened over the past year (and sadly most of it not in this blog). Anyway!

Environmental Station Alpha was rated the Best PC Metroidvania of 2015 at metroidvanias.com, along with Axiom Verge and Castle in the Darkness! I’m really glad about the game’s generally pretty positive reception, even despite all the little problems and quirks that unavoidably accompany a larger game designed by a single person. As an extra-cool thing, SmiteTV, who was one of the first to stream the game, has returned with the intention to do a full LP along with his co-commentator, Madithen. There have been lots of neat LPs of the game already, of course, but what makes this one especially intriguing is that it’ll probably be headed to lparchive.org once it’s completed! Sweet!

This year has been pretty interesting also in the sense that in a post-ESA world I’ve found in myself the ability to concentrate on game projects for longer period of time, even during those lulls in interest that have previously driven me away from a project for months; this is neat and makes me more certain about future projects. The weekly stream I’ve been doing since …April? has also helped a lot, although I’ve also noticed a tendency of hurrying and not concentrating enough while making games on-stream due to the feeling that I need to show “cool stuff” instead of working on more technical things.

I’ve been feeling really anxious at times about things happening in different parts of the world over the past year; it definitely feels like there’s a lot of anger, frustration and bad will bubbling in people’s minds everywhere, and I’m scared of the prospect that there are people who believe that hurting others is justifiable who might eventually decide to take the law in their own hands somewhere. Let’s hope that doesn’t happen!

(The year has also had lots of great things going on, though!)

To cap this weird end-of-the-year post, here’s a list of the games I’m working on:

1. The new metroidvania – It’s the thing I’ve been mostly showing while streaming. I couldn’t help it and ended up starting to work on a new metroidvania as soon as the old one was done. What I said earlier about hurrying and not concentrating enough has affected this project the most – I feel it has a lot of potential but I also feel that there are some things that I’ll eventually have to rework pretty heavily to really make the game work. Mainly graphical stuff, though.

2. Snake game – I’ll post screenshots once I get a bit further with the project, but people who have watched the stream have probably seen bits of this. Flying on a plane and seeing snakes, that inspires me a lot. I’ve been very excited about getting this project forward! Alas, there’s a lot of stuff in the engine that’s wonderfully complicated and I feel there’ll be several problems to solve before I’ll get the game to a truly polished-feeling state. Right now there’s one aggravating graphical bug that I dread to touch.

3.-6. Various smaller games that might need a bit more work before being “announced” – Yeah, this list is pretty silly because most of these games are in a pretty early form right now. But yes, there are some secrets projects I’m slowly also developing! These are mostly smaller, too, so it might be that I’ll finish them before my next “larger” project is done. Who knows!

Happy new year!

As is standard, the news get to this blog somewhat late, but YEAH!!!! the update is now here. It contains a new area, new bosses, new secrets and new new new new

Go to Steam and BUY THE GAME if you haven’t already! Thank you.

Just that! There’ll be new content and secrets, and some much-needed bugfixes. Yay!

Steam announcement here!

I’ve been doodling some characters for a story idea which is based on a concept I’ve been pondering and working on for some years now. This story idea is basically the third iteration of the concept, although I think I want to work the second story iteration into a separate work (a comic, maybe?) ESA was such an action-oriented game that it would be cool to make a game with an emphasis on story. It could also help overcome certain fears related to expressing more emotional dialogue (I usually feel terribly self-aware if I try to do that; not uncommon but it’d be cool to get over it).

I’ve played Undertale a lot lately, what a great game! It handles some game conventions in a really fresh way and has mostly amazingly good writing, both of which are rare sights in indie games. The soundtrack is also rather good. Gushing about the game here is probably kind of redundant, seeing how much attention it has gotten, but eh, I enjoyed it and wanted to say that. Here’s the Steam page.

Well, that game jam was last weekend. And it was lots of fun! Swam in the ocean for the first time this Summer and talked a lot with cool people; game development tends to be not that social most of the time so these moments where I can meet other game developers stand out nicely.

During the actual jam part I started to make a simple board-gameish online game where players have different jobs with different missions and have to carry them out. One of them is a traitor, with the mission to spoil everyone else’s objectives. I didn’t get quite as far as I had hoped, only managing the basic gameplay without the actual objectives, but it was fun making an online multiplayer game again. I probably wont keep working on it, but I might revisit the concept at a later date (although I do have several projects to work on at the moment anyway).

In other news, the game development streams I’ve been doing have been really enjoyable because it’s easier to concentrate on a project when I can’t just stop the moment I feel annoyed by a bug. This has also helped working on multiple projects at once. So thanks, everyone who has joined to watch the streams!

Also, Environmental Station Alpha’s Soundtrack is now out, for $2,99! Go check it out!