Hempuli's blog

To celebrate the ongoing 7-day FPS challenge, I made a really dumb raycasting engine in Multimedia Fusion 2:

Yay!!!

I’ve started to draw a longer, story-driven comic. I’m about 8 pages in (although I haven’t coloured/inked any of them, I hope that goes smoothly (going to use watercolour)), and I think I’ll open up some kind of a webcomic thing if I get far enough. Way too early to promise anything though. Nevertheless, I’m excited :)

As for ESA, I haven’t heard any news Greenlight-wise; it’s unfortunate that I can’t say more, but that’s the way it is, the release isn’t really in my hands now. Sorry about that!

More:

Announcement: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/updates/323687528/1412982809

OS X version of the Environmental Station Alpha Demo is now available at http://www.hempuli.com/esa ! The file size is rather large (roughly 140 Mb) because it contains a wrapper made with Wineskin by doh123 (wineskin.urgesoftware.com/). Unfortunately the port wont work with most gamepads.

The Windows version was also updated:

– Made the gamepad control settings properly available
– Credits can be left if viewed from the main menu
– Slight polish here and there

Enormous thanks to Pyry Kontio for handling the wrapping, testing and optimization!

Yeah, that’s true! The game’s votable on Steam Greenlight!

Please be a kind person and give your vote if you want to see the game on Steam!

Demo and new trailer available here!

I finished a new trailer and some website stuff yesterday – there’s some finalizing to be done but expect some big updates in a couple of days! I guess I wont say more for now!!!

!!!!!

1!!11!!

!

To be honest, work on ESA has been really smooth lately! Joonas “Kissa3” Turner joined our team to make sound effects, and against my fears his sounds (which are amazing) work really well with Roope “Noby” Mäkinen‘s musics (which are amazing). Amazing!
Multimedia Fusion can play sounds either “on its own”, shuffling them to empty channels without the user having to worry about it, or on specified channels. I’ve usually played music and looping ambient noises on a specified channel, and other SFX without a specified channel. Usually this works well, since I can adjust the volume levels of the channels to make some fade effects etc, and don’t have to really care about what happens to the “generic” SFX.
However, now I’ve ran into a bit of a problem with this system (although I’ve been aware of it before). I can’t properly alter the volume of the samples not played on a specified channel, and thus the only volumes I can adjust are the Main Volume (affecting both SFX and music) and Music Volume (affecting the channel the musics are played on). In my older games I’ve just ignored this and put only “music” and “general volume” options in the settings menu, but in ESA the sound effects and musics are pretty different in style, and thus need to be balanced more carefully (not to mention that I’d like to do my very best with this game!)
Fortunately I think I’ve found a way to manually work around this, by making a system where every sample is played on a specified channel so that the game is always aware of “free” channels and only plays SFX on those. This is somewhat cumbersome to do and will require some extra attention to stuff like several sound effects playing at the same time, but I think it’ll be worth it.

  …So I guess the point of this post is that I’ve got some work to do!!
(Also working on a new trailer)

(Trying out new logos for the game)

So, I promised some news to give you early this week. As usual, things weren’t quite as simple and dandy as I thought, so I can’t give as certain updates about the situation as I hoped last weekend. Anyway!

– I’ve discussed the soundwork stuff with Noby, and we’ve agreed on a deadline at the beginning of september! This means that by then the game will be in release state, and in the meantime I’ll keep polishing and adding new optional content.

– Once again I’ve started thinking critically about how to publish the game, and considered some options with my workmates. When I made the release date estimation announcement, I hoped I’d have a definite plan for this by now, but it turns out (unsurprisingly) that before even considering approaching a publisher of any kind, I’ll have to do some (a lot of) extra work. I’m really lost when it comes to who to contact and when, but I’ll try to get this settled down as soon as possible.

I’m terribly sorry about all the missed promises and deadlines, but most of them were made with a freeware game in mind (and without thinking about things other than “how quickly could I theoretically be done with this?”) I really hope I can get over with this post-game stuff fast, because it’s really not my field.

CRYSTALS

CRYSTALS CRYSTALS CRYSTALS

CRYSTALS

Thanks for everyone who participated! Here’s a link to the recording: http://www.twitch.tv/hempuli/b/555974189

Earlier today I finished the last “obligatory” things in ESA. There are some tweaks I want to make and polish to be done, as well as a load of bugs I haven’t noticed yet; I’ll be sending the first “final” version to testers tomorrow and hopefully the final missing things will be tweaked to some kind of a final state in the coming weeks.

So, what’s missing? Why’s there no release date?

There are two reasons for me not having decided on a release date yet and in general being somewhat confused and/or worried about the game’s release:

• Audio: When I say that the last obligatory thing is done, I mean the last obligatory thing I can personally affect; there’s some sound missing and we’re working on getting the rest of the soundtrack done. Due to several good reasons the composer has been very busy for some time now and has thus been unable to work much on the soundtrack, which I completely understand but which means that the release will have to wait. In the meantime I’ll be trying to build up a placeholder sound system, so that adding the audio will be as quick and painless as possible.
• Publishing: For about half a year now people’ve asking me about whether the game will be freeware or not. To be absolutely honest, I’d love to release the game for free, and even promised this some time ago at a moment when I felt completely overwhelmed by life and didn’t feel like thinking at all about founding a company or any of the other things that go into successfully publishing a game.
  However, I’d definitely need the money, and know some amazing people who could help me a lot with the more confusing aspects of publishing a game. It also seems to me that these days people are much less willing to download some random freeware games off a website, and instead prefer Steam and other such platforms due to the ease and a hint of quality control. So in the end, I’m really undecided on this issue, which kind of awful because going through the publishing ordeal would affect the release date pretty drastically.

So there; hopefully these two things will be figured out eventually, but right now they’ll continue to be obstacles for releasing the game. I guess I’ll try to spend whatever time is left to polish everything as much as possible.

 In other news, I’m working on a comic! I’ll post it here once it’s done; it’s pretty terrible but it feels great to be working on a larger art project after such a long time.

I just finished pretty much the final thing left in ESA yesterday :) unfortunately the soundwork is still in development so it’ll take some more time to get the game out.

However! There’ll be a new stream this Friday at 11 PM UTC/GMT! If you have any specific things you’d like to see, tell me :)