Hempuli's blog

So, that was a pretty neat christmas (my mother is the best chef everrr). Obviously couldn’t really work much on games during that time, although I did tweak some stuff for Incomitat (intending to get it working better). However, here’s The Plan:
- I’m going to update Masjin with mostly bugfixes soon. There were some weird things in the editor and the likes, and I’d like to get rid of those (possibly also add another item, we’ll see).
- I have a dare with Petri Purho to create a game in 7 days before 2012. Technically the LD game would suffice, but I think I want to prototype an older idea and see where I can go with it. We’ll see what comes out of this, but if everything goes right (wrong?) I may not be able to work on other stuff until the next year.
- Slowly working on Officer Alfred. I think the cutscene is nearly done, but I let my bro play the game and noted quite a few annoyances that I want to get rid of.
- SOPA sucks. A lot. If you live in the USA, go to the barricades or something.

Well then, Ludum Dare 22 went past quickly and silently. The theme was “alone“, which I didn’t like too much. I had a coupla nice ideas, but as often happens in games of mine, the one I chose eventually proved out to be too ambitious.
My concept was to procedurally generate an island, and then put the player onto it and allow him/her to wander freely, trying to explore and find cool stuff. A concept like this quite much *cries* for feature creep, and that’s quite much what happened. I lost my motivation/inspiration towards the end of the compo, but managed to get it back in order to add some more meat to the thing. In the end I was left with something called “Incomitat”.
As it stands, the game is kind of confusing. There’re surprisingly many things to do, and I enjoy playing around by myself, but for anyone else it’s probably a thorough mystery. For example, there’s a hunger meter in the game that the player can fill by eating things. However, due to the time limit I managed to cram only few foodstuffs. The result is that any normal player will probably starve due to not realizing that they have to find a gun from a random abandoned house, then some ammo and then go shoot some bunnies or birds.
The concept is something I’ll absolutely want to return to later on; it fascinates me and I’d really like to make a game where the island was genuinely full of cool stuff to find. However, as it stands, I’d have to tweak a lot of the code and try to make that cool stuff available for all players instead of those who manage to think the exact same way I do.

Go play the game!

^^ Seconded. The deadline is 17th October, and I really want to get this thing done before that! Once I’ve got a demo out for the competition, I’ll get back to work on the level editor.

Welp, looks like port 6121 is broken again; I’ll get in touch with Jamie asap. Port 6122 seems to work well at the moment.

As for other things, I’ve been working on something to put to the upcoming IGF competition. I’m quite sure you can tell what it is.

So, the creator of Lacewing, Jamie, has updated the network extension to a new version, with a lot of new stuff to have fun with. Problem is, there are still some little bugs and at the moment Masjin can’t really be updated until he fixes certain data-sending related things. I was quite worried today when the game suddenly stopped working, but I’ll try to contact him tomorrow.

I noted a couple days ago that Masjin was mentioned (again) on the indiegames blog, and now there has also been a mention at Rock, Paper, Shotgun! Sweet stuff, thanks for informing me about these.

Indieblog link
RPS link

Oh well, so Ludum Dare was last weekend, with the theme ‘Escape’. Wasn’t really my cup of tea, and in the end I didn’t manage to create anything of interest, just a simple engine for a possible future game (I spent so much timing finishing parts of the engine that I ultimately didn’t need).

On other news, I’ll be moving away from my parents’ soon, which’ll mean a pause in any updates whatsoever. Not that big a deal, but it’s pretty exciting for me! And then for the games:
Beyond the Black Hole: Yep, still not given up on this! The engine is old and horrid, but I hope that inspiration eventually strikes and I can get it done.
Masjin: I think I’ll make an update to fix the currently existing bigger bugs and then take some time off the project in order to pursue other stuff.
Paradise Fort flash: I recently found a much easier way to handle certain stuff, so expect to see some updates on this eventually!

Then there’re various smaller things I’m working on or at least planning to work on. As Usual, I’ll wait until they’re a bit more ripe before announcing ‘em.

Stuff like this.

I’ve been slightly out of steam, but I’m quite sure I’ll get the next update out this week. After that I’m quite sure I’ll try to work on other projects for a while; I’d like to get some games such as Officer Alfred done. Next weekend I’ll zoom off to Stockholm for No More Sweden, yippee! I’m even going to hold a presentation. I’ll try to advertize Masjin there a bit, it’d be nice to get a lan-like session of the game running (that might even help to locate some bugs). Hopefully the weekend will be all kinds of great anyway.

On other news, check out this insanely neat fan-made Masjin trailer:

I decided that that game ought to be finished for good, so I made a list of things that still have to be added and started working on them. Here’s the list:
Level editor
In-game status/game data screen
Player ‘accounts’ and then status pages for them
Diagonal tiles for the builder (finally!)
Musics & sound effects
Proper readme & some more stuff into the main menus
Post-game summary for a finished round

I already implemented the diagonals, as seen here (the ugly grey box has to be there, unfortunately :()

Currently I’m working on the level editor. It’s relatively simple though there are some things I need to think about before implementing. Sneak peek: