Hempuli's blog

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:

I’ve been hugely busy with exams lately, but I’m glad to inform you (?) that I’m indeed working on games. After next tuesday I’ll have more than enough time to finish some game-related stuffery. Let’s have an inventario:

Masjin: The game is approaching a state I’d be willing to call ‘somewhat finished’. It has been fun to work on the game, but I think I’ll want to move on soonish. My intention at the start was to work it to the stage where I can show it off on some lanparties or jams, and I think I achieved that! :)

Beyond the Black Hole: Haven’t forgot this, no! The engine is starting to get quite rusty and I strongly dislike the way I made the game work. However, since I’ve already made it this far I certainly want to finish it at some point.

Once in Space (Flash): I haven’t posted about this, but I thought of redoing my first game on the hempuli.com website, this time without stupid bugs and bad design, and fully in flash! I don’t want to spend ages on this project, though, so expect to see something done pretty fast.

Officer Alfred (Flash): In works; I have nice plans for this but it’ll have to wait for until I have OiS out. I want to redo the whole game with a better story and level design. This wont be a very big game in the end, but enough that I can deliver the story I want and present the puzzles I’ve got in my mind.

Paradise Fort (Flash): Has been a bit frozen due to me not being in contact with sereneworx; also I’m concentrating on other stuff currently.

Also there are a couple smaller things I’ve been pondering; maybe I’ll write more elaborately about them later. After playing a lot of Steamlands by Nitrome (It’s a fantastic game, go play it!), I’ve been starting to look more to the way they develop games. Their ideas seem to be quite similar to mine, except better implemented in every possible way. Maybe I should try a similar, stricter schedule they use for developing games – it probably wouldn’t work, though.

Also I made a .gif. It’s not for anything, just felt like making it. It’s quite big so wait patiently.

Also I played with custom palettes:

I added a freakin’ new enemy type! Also did a lot of other stuff, but there’re still some pretty huge things to be made before I can hope for the game to feel actually playable. Hopefully I’ll do those later this week!

I finally, finally got that donation button going. I’m sorry, it’s paypal, but it’s still the easiest method around.

THIS IS A HYPNOTIC MESSAGE – GIVE YOUR MONEYS TO ME OR ELSE!

Those… two(?) of you who’ve read the blog through may already have noticed the bane of my game-creation progress: I get projects going, they go nicely for a while and then WHOOP they give birth to two new, unrelated projects and the same continues until I finally manage to complete one of them and then leave the rest to die. I don’t like it, my morivation just kinda jumps from one thing to another. I hope something miraculous will happen in the future to cure this. Maybe I should just realize that one has to try to shamble through the tedious parts and not just seek fun in game creation?

Anyway, I’ll list my current stuff here:
Beyond the Black Hole: I’m quite confident I’ll eventually finish this, slowly though. I also thought of maybe redoing the current game to remove the keyboard control – it might be more appealing to Your Average Gamer if it was mouse-only.
World Generator: The generator itself is sleeping but I’m working on a game that might work with it. More about it later.
Excavatorrr 2: I have several ideas for this, but at the same I’m thinking that the game might benefit greatly from flash. However, several attempts with MMF 2 flash export have proven that I have to actually learn AS3 before I can get it to work without lag.
The ‘fourth’ thing I mentioned earlier quite much died in silence. I’m still adding some things to it but I don’t have high hopes about its survival.

Currently I’ve been looking forward to make some neat flash game so that I could try more the financial side of gaming. I wouldn’t want to actually sell games, that’d just lower the player interest and make me feel bad, but there’s a lot of money in flash games, even on the ad revenue level. I’ve been pondering several types of games, but my mind has lately settled to some sort of a castlevania/VVVVVV-like thing. Since we’re aiming for those silly casual gamers here, the game shouldn’t be too complicated to play, har har.
Part of the reason I posted those Apocalypse Adventure videos down there is because I’ve also been more interested in games with similar gameplay lately. Ideally, the World Generater Game would fill this slot very well, I’d just need to add some post-apocalyptic stuff to it, so I thought that since I’m working on that, I could use the same engine for a non-PCG game. There’s not much of it yet, however, I’ve been concentrating on graphics. I got a weird idea – if I make some graphics first, it might feel less of a chore to make the actual code.
Anyway, here they are. I started with the normal guy and the skeleton, and since Minecraft is a nice game I thought that I’d add the rest of them. Creeper will not appear in the World Generator game! Sorry!

So a certain very awesome person called Looki (He’s helped me a lot over the years!) made me a nice bloom overlay that didn’t suck unlike the other bloom shaders for MMF. However, now that I have it in, I’m not sure if it’s the best choice. I’ve tried different combinations, and today has also been a nice lesson for me about shaders overall.

Of course, the ideal solution would be to get a similar blur as was in the desktop picture, but darn if I know what are the functions in Paint.NET’s “soften photo”-tool! So we’ll have to rely on bloom.

So here are a couple different choices. From left ro right & top to bottom: Bloom and shadows, just shadows, nothing, and just bloom. Sorry about the changing background colour; bloom brightens it up a lot so I had to alter it. And I’m really not sure what would look best!

Here are also some crazier attempts:

I’m currently multitasking several different games at once. I have no problem with that, but I should actually be reading to exams which are going to take place next wednesday. Oh well.

Anyway, I’ll list here some stuff I’m currently working on and tell a bit about their progress.
Firstly, there’s the world generator I made a couple posts about earlier. After a longish pause, I got around to add rivers and roads to the world. After a lot of struggling with getting the rivers look good, I think I’m getting somewhere. Next I should just make the generation automatic instead of manual click-to-create, and then start working on roads.

They look nice, don't they?

Earlier attempt.

The next thing is of course Beyond the Black Hole. I don’t quite know what I’m going to do with this, since I don’t think I can bring myself to create all the planned 35 levels. A possibility would be to finish the planet currently at hand, and then the last planet to get 20 levels. I continued working on level 13, as you can see in the post below, but currently I’m a bit stuck with the puzzle. For once it’s not just about motivational problems!

After making that Excavatorrr idea I became sad because I realized how much potential was lost in that one: I myself think that the game was really neat, and that it was positively addicting once the player got hang of the controls. That last bit was the problem, of course: Most players don’t want to take their time to learn a random game, much less if the game isn’t all that big and doesn’t take long to beat. So, last night I started pondering a bit if a remake/sequel to the game could be justified. With my new knowledge, I’d be able to create a much better engine, make a flash export, and possibly connect the game leaderboards to things like Kongregate and so on. That’d be kinda neat. Also the slowness and controlling problems of the original could be taken care of.

There’s also a fourth thing I’ve been playing with, but I wont say much about it yet because I’m quite sure it’ll fail like most other projects I’ve started. So pics will come once I know more!

So, I’ve been working on a game for about 5 months now. I’m quite close to the point where I think I’ll publish the game, but suddenly I got a totally different idea and started making that instead. The big game wont be abandoned, but it may take some time before I get tired of this other thing and can continue.

Anyway, I posted some animated gifs of this new silliness to the TIgsource forums. Like the great blogger I am, I didn’t even think of posting them here earlier. But anyway, that might make those two of you that look at this post excited, so let’s do it!

Horribly bad quality and slow? Do check.
I’ll probably drop this eventually when I become tired of it, but for now it has come up nicely and it has been fun to work on it. I’ll make a post with more info when it’s clearer if this shall be something.

Not that anyone reads this blog, but I feel that I have to post something occasionally.

So, this place will probably become a bit more active in a couple weeks. I have a project going and will eventually post some information about it here. I’ll wait until I reach certain stage before talking about the game, though, because I hate it when I blabber about my next “AWESOME” game and then realize I have to abandon it. You know, some people might feel like they have been let down.

Bonus pineapple