Archive for the ‘Happenings’ Category.

Oh! My Roommate Is a Lasergun?!

The blind speedrunning community (i.e. people who speedrun games they haven’t seen before, prima vista) had a showcase of their Mystery Tournament last weekend on the Games Done Quick Twitch channel, and as a special thing I made a small game for them to speedrun. The game I made is called Oh! My Roommate Is a Lasergun?!, and it’s essentially a remake of GENERIC Platformer, which I made in 2009. The game utilizes old things in other ways, too; the background art was originally made for… Timerocketxby? Or maybe GENERIC itself? It’s hard to remember. Anyway, I recycled the assets here. The music was also originally made as little Shovel Knight -inspired test tunes in 2016, but with a little touching-up they made for very fine in-game tracks.

CHECK THE GAME OUT

Progress post #143: GDQ!!

Baba is still coming along; a lot has happened in terms of e.g. bugs being fixed and so on, but at the same time those large milestones of 1) finishing the editor and 2) finishing the upcoming extra levelpacks are still yet to be achieved. But we go forward, and lately I’ve streamed more often and that has been very helpful for progress.

Baba Is You was speedrun by Succinct_and_Punchy at the Games Done Quick online event last week, 21st of August. It was really cool! People seemed to be very excited about the run and in general were extremely supportive. Thank you!

As seen above, among other changes I’ve added two new characters to the game: Fofo and Jiji. I feel that one more character might be warranted but I’m quite happy about these two for now.

Tesseract Tapa!

I was recently introduced to the slightly picross-ish pen-and-paper category of puzzles called Tapa. They’ve been a lot of fun to solve, and way more satisfying to me than, say, sudokus. You can find a lot of them here, with instructions on how they work!

I recently saw someone make a 3D version of a Star Battle, another pen-and-paper puzzle type. Being who I am, I found the concept really intriguing and started pondering if it’d be possible to add one more dimension to the deal. I’m not good or familiar with Star Battles, so I went with the more-familiar Tapa ruleset and did some research & Love2D coding during the midsummer holidays and ultimately ended up with what you see above, the Hypertapa.

Due to how 4D works I had to devise some rather awkward extra rules to make the challenge make sense on some level, but I’ve now confirmed that the solution works so that’s great! Thanks to Deusovi for showing tapas to me and being the first to complete this.

So yeah. That’s how I spent my midsummer holidays (I did also sauna a bunch, visit my parents and eat good food & scratch a dog!)

Baba & Pride Month & Racial Injustice

I made a whole bunch of Pride flags in Baba Is You! If you’re interested, you can see & download them here (imgur album)!

Baba Is You is also part of the Humble Fight for Racial Injustice Bundle, along with games such as Spelunky, FTL and Hyper Light Drifter! Click the image below to check it out :)

Progress post #138: Awards and stuff

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.

7-Day Roguelike Challenge + 10 year anniversary??

After ~4 years of trying and failing, I finally took part in the 7-Day Roguelike Challenge (or 7DRL, as it’s generally known as) last week (https://7drl.com/). I still failed to finish my game in time, but compared to the only previous time I’ve actually managed to create something (in 2016), the addition of lua to my repertoire allowed quite a bit faster development and I actually got pretty far with my project. Sadly, after streaming for 8 hours on one day, I had a headache for 2 consecutive days and that kind of destroyed my chances of actually finishing. Still, I’m pretty happy with what I have now and thus decided that instead of submitting an obviously unfinished game for the challenge, I’ll try to poke at it and make it available when some of the more obvious missing features are in.

I’m especially happy about the font.

In other news! I was looking at the nice list of months in the blog sidebar, and it suddenly dawned on me that this blog is now over 10 years old! My inability to post regularly has consistently kept it from being as neat as it could be, but I’m nonetheless very happy that some kind of a catalogue of my past game-development endeavours has stayed alive this long. Thanks to Excavatorrr for giving me the push to set this up originally.

Now let’s see if we’ll get another 10 years of use out of this…!

Oh yeah, and one more (set of) thing(s): I was going to give a talk about Baba Is You at the Game Developers Conference, The MiXit conference and an event called Addon, but the first two have been canceled thanks to COVID-19, and since the third would be organized in France, I would be very surprised if it wasn’t cancelled as well. I’m currently also awaiting word on what’ll happen with Nordic Game Jam this year. Wild times.

Baba Is You will be out March 13th!

(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!

Updatedsds

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!

Weekly-12 progress post #111: Rules

Huh, WordPress looks very different now. I kinda miss the old system. Anyway! After a month+ of no game development streams, I managed to implement some Baba rule changes on-stream today. Progress was very smooth, although at the very end I realized a rather unfortunate implication of the system I was implementing that I’ll have to mull over. Still, very nice! I also played a couple Ludum Dare entries to close the stream off.

The end of the year is closing in on us, and that means I’ll have to get Baba to its finalized state sometime soon! Especially the audio is something I’ve been overlooking for too long now – gotta have to concentrate my efforts on that.

Ludum Dare #43: Sacrifices must be made

Ludum Dare #43 was last weekend! I have some exams coming but really wanted to participate; the theme didn’t initially give any inspiration and I was ready to call it a studying weekend, but then an idea struck and I ended up creating something.

My entry is Ludum Dare Simulator, a game where the sacrifices come in form of allocating time and resources to finish a game under the 48-hour time limit. This is done by placing blocks on a grid where every cell represents a single hour of Ludum Dare. The game is heavily inspired by the boardgame Patchwork that was recently shown to me.

The game itself is fairly simple (although the underlying scoring rules are way complicated, oh well), but for me the most interesting bits come after the player submits their game and goes to the scoring phase. I wanted to add some funny stuff to liven up the experience, so there are some surprised to be seen after finishing. It felt really good to finish an LD entry, considering at least two of my previous entries (Sublunar Vessel and Super Metabolism Bros) were left in a somewhat unfinished state. I even had time to compose music!

Ludum Dare page

Download the game