(Alternatively, check the official Nintendo version here: Yeah)
Right! Baba will be released very soon, and that’s great. I’m a week or so late with this blogpost, but eh, I’ve gotten some evidence that some people actually follow this blog from time to time, and I want to support that.
The game will cost USD $15, or 12.50€ if you prefer that.
Wishlisting the game on Steam would be massively useful at the moment, so consider doing that if you haven’t yet.
I’ve ordered some Baba t-shirts! They’ll probably be gone after GDC.
I’m really excited about seeing videos & streams of the game – even though seeing someone get stuck in a game you made can be really frustrating/discouraging, there’s always some entertainment as well, plus I really hope I get to see someone appreciate some of the more inventive moments of the game.
I’ve also been slowly putting together the OST of the game. Due to various reasons, some of which were discussed in that earlier Baba post, there has been need for a lot of tweaking to make the music sound nice for the official soundtrack. The side-effect of that is that the in-game music has improved some as well, so while the process is exhausting, it hopefully increases the overall audio quality, little by little.
Anyway, there’ll be more news coming soon – I really need to remember to update here because I’m very fond of this blog. Slowly getting used to this block system of WordPress’, too!
Hello! There have been a couple streams since the last time I did a “”””weekly”””” update, but for whatever reason I couldn’t muster the energy to make proper blogposts to commemorate them.
Anyway! Things have been going semi-swimmingly, Baba-wise – the game is now feature-complete (to an extent), and we’re just handling some final timing and business stuff related to releasing a game. Baba will be on Steam, Humble Store, itch.io and Nintendo Switch™, and it’ll support Mac and Linux on top of just Windows! Huge thanks to MP2 Games for making this large a selection of platforms a possibility (by porting the game). An inevitable result is, of course, that there’s way more stuff to be handled before release. We’ll see how everything turns out.
A cool thing about Baba is that this time I’ve made the OST by myself! This resulted in a huge mess right before finishing the game, but has otherwise been pretty cool and confidence-boosting. It also means that I’ll get to set up a Bandcamp page! (And deal with “mastering” sound, what does that even mean)
As for the “huge mess”, we were a couple minutes away from calling the game done and sending it forward for further approval when I notified Mathias (the person behind MP2 Games) about worse audio quality on other platforms. Pretty soon it turned out that the issue was in my computer only, and the culprit was the AudioWizard program on my control panel having been set to Music Mode by default. I had spent a bunch of time trying to remove any involuntary audio enhancements from this laptop back in 2015 when I got it, but apparently I had managed to miss this utility that actually did affect my audio output rather heavily. Music Mode in this case meant some combination of equalizers and compressors that e.g. heavily (*very* heavily) emphasized bass. After turning the setting off, the sound quality wasn’t necessarily “worse”, but certain songs had ear-hurting sounds in them that had been smoothed over by the Music Mode, and some songs sounded much thinner without the bass boost.
I went into full emergency mode and contacted some very talented audio designer friends in seek of help. In the end we realized that I can just run the audio through the Music Mode effect and re-record the adjusted sound using Stereo Mix to get the bass-boosted result. However, the earlier bass boost had also brought some uncomfortable audio elements of its own that I had mostly ignored until now, so even with the relatively simple solution I had to spend some 3-4 days editing and re-mixing everything, especially since the effect also affected SFX. Mathias very kindly implemented a batch tool for me so that replacing the SFX wasn’t quite as time-consuming as it otherwise would’ve been.
But that’s now history, and there haven’t seemed to be any new massive hindrances to handle. I’ll be going to GDC in March both for Baba and as a part of the Nolla Games team to promote our upcoming game, Noita. I’ve also ordered some new Baba-related merch to celebrate the occasion. I just wish flying wasn’t such a planet-hurting move. Same for the merch on a smaller scale, actually.
I’d kinda like to do an image-heavy update as an apology for continuously not managing to keep this blog alive, but this new WordPress system is a bit scary and I have a headache so that might have to wait for a later necromancy post. I’ll try to keep the blog updated with new Baba info, and ESA2 once I finally get that far.
P.S. I’ve been enjoying Cultist Simulator by Weather Factory a whole lot again. Very inspiring, beautiful-sounding and -looking!
I had a massive 8+-hour stream yesterday and another of some 4-5 hours today; I spent most of those working on the penguin game (now titled “Stumblehill”). I’d like to get the game’s levels done before GDC but that’s looking somewhat unlikely. I finished the second level on Saturday and worked on the game’s map today. It seems that the biggest slowing factor is the need for extra assets, and hopefully the third level won’t be quite as demanding in that regard.
I’ll be leaving for the Game Developers Conference on the 18th of March! From there it’ll be a week of probably outrageous amounts of social interaction and receiving Baba compliments from various directions. I’m not *super* stressed about this but I’m sure it’s a force that affects my mood on the background. It’d be really cool to get a prize in the IGF! The beginning week will probably be mostly work on first Stumblehill, then making sure that Baba works at GDC.
What else… 7drl was last week and I started making some simple prototypes but (maybe luckily?) I couldn’t concentrate on them much due to all this vidyagame hubbub.
I’ve had a little sideproject going for a bit and it needs to be finished pretty soon so for the past couple weeks I’ve been concentrating on that instead of Baba; apart from some polish and bugginess most of what I want to have in Baba before GDC is there which is great! March will probably absolutely terrifyingly busy so getting any errant projects out of the way beforehand seems like a good plan.
Anyway! During today’s stream I drew some more art for the project shown above (more info coming soon) and added a new level to Baba. It feels funny and fun to do higher-resolution art for a change; apart from animation I’m enjoying it a lot! Very different.
Things are very exciting right now! Sadly a lot of the excitement will become more available to others at a later date, but at least I can post gamedev updates every now and then. Once things settle down a bit I’ll count how many weekly streams I’ve missed and do some kinda marathon, that might be fun. Sorry!!
So yeah, my ability to stream weekly has been superbly bad for a while now. Unfortunately it’ll probably get worse before it gets betterm what with the upcoming GDC and so on! I’ll try to do better, believe me!
In any case, today’s stream was very active and productive! I finally divided the game’s map into sub-areas containing thematically similar levels (example above). This has been on the to-do list for a while now but because I’m sure there are several bugs with the sub-map system still & I’ve had to have a testable version available I haven’t dared to really get to it. A quick test already turned up several bugs, although nothing too serious. Once this map system is stable enough, I’ll start laying down the final theming of the levels, sculpting the “main” map and implementing missing features (for example locks that require a certain amount of completed levels to open). Also more music!
Here’s a teaser of an underwater-themed song I made:
Well, well, well… A new year! It has definitely started in a very hectic manner for me, what with all the IGF business. I streamed today for the first time this year, and actually got a pretty large system finished!
Originally I had planned for all the levels to use the same object palette by default, with level-specific changes possible to be done via the level editor. However, after implementing this I realized that I’ll want to have several, maybe even over a dozen levels that use the same changes (to create “areas” or clusters of levels that are thematically similar), and doing all the changes by hand every time would get old fast, both for me and potential users who want to use the editor. Therefore I’ve now implement a theme system, where I can edit and save a theme with a specified palette & changes to the objects, and then load that theme into a level. So next I’ll just have to create themes for all these environments/themes I want to have and apply them to the levels accordingly.
I’ve been dabbling with the level editor for a long time now and I hope this change allows me to move forward, at least for a little while!!
Well would you look at that, Baba Is You was nominated finalist in 4 categories at the Independent Games Festival, the largest (?) indie game competition in the world. One of these is even the grand prize! Here’s the full list:
SEUMAS MCNALLY GRAND PRIZE
EXCELLENCE IN DESIGN
NUOVO AWARD (Basically the “innovative experimental stuff” award)
BEST STUDENT GAME (I’m still a student at the University of Helsinki, mind you!)
So yeah, this is very exciting news for me! Can’t wait to get this game actually done!!!
In related news, I’ll be traveling to the Game Developers’ Conference in March, partially to finally attend this magical event I’ve been hearing so much about, but also partially because I felt that Baba had garnered enough semi-spontaneous interest that it’d be a good idea to show it off in a larger event. Being a finalist in a bunch of categories is a really good additional reason to go, so I guess I’m happy I am doing just that?
