Archive for the ‘Other’ Category.

World Puzzle Championship 2022

Last year I was given the opportunity to make some paper puzzles for the World Puzzle Championship, held in Poland. It was suggested that out of the genres I’ve come up with, Celltinels and Limited Alike might be the best suited for the job, so I ended up making 4 puzzles of varying difficulties for both genres (and an extra Celltinels puzzle for reasons I’m slightly hazy about – I think it was an alternative version of the 3rd puzzle in the set in case the first one was too hard or too easy?) This was really cool and I’m happy I was asked to make them! Thanks! I also do hope that my kinda happy-go-lucky approach to puzzle design didn’t cause too much stress…

There was a one-year embargo on releasing the puzzles outside the event, and that has now passed so after seeing the fellow puzzle designer Menderbug release theirs, I thought I’d go ahead and do the same.

First, here are the rules for both genres as reminders:

Celltinels rules, formatted in a very awkward way because this was one of the first paper puzzletypes I ever made. Click for big.

Note! The clue numbers block the “vision” of other clues!

And here are the puzzles:

What happened in July

I guess I could try doing a monthly update, since weekly updates were clearly too difficult for me and several of the past blogposts have been kind of general “what’s been going on” style affairs.

1: Kepi

I released another boardgame! The main motivator for making it was that I had these wooden sticks that felt difficult to use because they were cylindrical and as such rolled really easily. I bought a cheap “Yankee scarf” for 1,5€ in the local dollar store equivalent to help with the rolling, and in the end was very satisfied with the overall look. The game turned out to have some stalemating issues, but a rule addition suggested by pinchazumos seems to have fixed that. Thanks! You can download the rules for free here.

2: First Planet Keke song

I almost-finished the first tune for this game, and decided to make a proper preview video to showcase it! There are little details that I still want to adjust in the song, but overall I’m happy with it. The game has also been coming along pretty nicely, although there’s plenty left to do.

3: Watercolours

I had a small notebook and decided to do some little paintings in it. It was fun to paint again, and the small size ensured that being more haphazard about it didn’t feel bad.

4: Summer cottage

I spent a couple days at our summer cottage. It was neat! Photo not mine.

5: New Baba tactics game work

I hadn’t worked on this for a while, so it was nice to get some new work done on it.

Comic, games + more

First of all, I made another little comic!

Second of all, I went and updated the website so that there are no more imgur links in the game screenshots; I noticed that some of those links had died and it made sense to go for entirely local images. I should eventually also add local download links for those games that only offer an Itch.io link, I think. We’ll see. I also shuffled the games around a bit because I felt that some notably tiny games were in the “medium games” category and vice versa. Also some games graduated to the “big games” category! I should really rethink the category system altogether…

Third of all, the paper puzzle collection has been updated with the latest puzzle types like Equal measures and Diagaquarium.

Fourth of all – I made Masjin available again! The server’s still dead, but at least you can download the game (and the server hosting tool is likewise available again).

Fifth and final of all, have some screenshots of the games I’m working on:

Comic, borthday + paper puzzle collection!

I made an extremely juvenile 6-page comic called Wasserkloset Destiny:Ultra! You can read it here: https://www.hempuli.com/comic/?title=comics&id=7

My birthday was a couple days ago and a friend made me a cool birthday Baba card! It’s cool!

I’ve also updated the Paper Puzzle collection with the Equal measures puzzles, as well as a new Diagaquarium puzzle. You can see that below alongside another new Equal measures puzzle.

Drawings and paintings!

I posted some drawings I doodled as a part of a Stars Without Number campaign my friend is running earlier this year; I’ve since drawn more of them, as well as painted a couple other small pieces, so have at you:




Boardgame fun!

I made a small abstract boardgame! It’s so small, in fact, that all the components fit in a normal playing card box:

I’ve accumulated a lot of boardgame components over the past ~2 years because I was playing more boardgames in general and got the itch to design my own. To a large extent buying components was one of those unhealthy “I can justify this as vaguely useful and it gives me happy feelings” shopping habit things; I have currently more various game pieces, coins and other such bits than I’d probably need. Not great, but ideally I’ll eventually utilize all those bits and pieces in one way or another.

Anyway!! I recently read the book Lautapelien Historia (translates to ‘History of Boardgames‘) by Ari Saastamoinen; it was fairly interesting, although fairly lopsided in favour of chess & go. The book concentrating on abstract games (combined with the aforementioned accumulation of boardgame components) made me want to design a simple abstract boardgame. I’m not a very skilled boardgame designed but crafting the board and pieces was fun. I’ll probably post the rules here once I’m happy with them.

In other news, I’ve been steadily working on several projects for the past months. ESA2 progresses at a fairly steady pace, while the Keke rocket game and the Into the Breach -esque puzzler have had some chugs in development, followed usually by bursts of activity. On top of these 3 there’s also a collection of solitaires I’ve been making in Löve2D, inspired, again, by the Zachtronics Solitaire Collection. Compared to the others, this game is a bit more limited in scope, and as such I managed to even put out a beta version with 8 solitaires included (including Babataire & Babataire EX, now with more appropriate names)! You can download that version on Itch.io.

Font images!

I’ve drawn a ton of different fonts over the years for various games without really thinking about it that much further. Some time ago I wondered if it’d be cool to extract them from the Fusion project files and put them available for download, and seeing the cool font packages by SysL convinced me to do it.

Sadly, since I have very low skills at fontmaking, I wasn’t able to figure out FontForge (suggested by Shinmera) to make TTF files to accompany the fonts; so for now, the bundle contains just a spritesheet with the symbols. Hopefully this can change later.

Anyway, check the fonts here!

Stuff I’ve made, 2006-2023

I went through my “finished games” folder to make a spreadsheet of how many games I’ve finished each year, and made a graph about the info gathered. Said folder contains a bunch of non-game programs or things that were submitted for e.g. Ludum Dare but were never really properly finished, so the results aren’t exactly 100% accurate, but it was a fun if self-indulgent pastime. One big point of inaccuracy is also that the 2006 data probably doesn’t contain some old things I thought of as finished but never put available anywhere because, well, they were terrible or I didn’t have a website yet to put them on.

I also went and included some titles I worked on but don’t keep in a personal “finished thing” folder, such as Noita or the ancient Abstractica games.

Also made an updated version later with some even earlier stuff in!

Chicory!

I played and 100%’d Chicory on my Switch. What a fun game! It was interesting to notice how a game about painting could to some extent inspire one to actually put effort to drawings no-one else will probably ever see; I guess it can be chalked up as a point in favour of the game’s writing that I cared enough about the characters to want to paint the entire game world (although some areas not on the map got noticeably lazier colouring).

THAT SAID, I did also paint some stuff that I thought I’d want to show others; I’ve posted them on Twitter and Cohost already, but why not here as well?? So here we go:

Sci-fi TTRPG doodles

I’ve been participating in a Stars Without Number TTRPG campaign led by a friend, and doodling about the various things we’ve seen throughout it. I thought I had posted some earlier doodles here but I guess not. Anyway, here’s some art!

Space elevator and my character’s bus that he drives
Random stuff
Harrison’s, the space motel owned by the family of one of our characters
The Shelter, a desert town of Shady People
Hideout of one of our characters, Olive
Spaceship designs
Space snacks inspired by Uramachi Sakaba
Space yakitori stand
Shay, a bird person who owns(?) an auction house
Desert hideout
A droid we found in our ship
Flying in the Fold (with an inscrutable Finnish pun)

Welp, that was quite a bit of stuff. Oh well.