Archive for the ‘Plans’ Category.
Hi! I finally drew a comic in English again. I’ve been drawing Finnish comics for the student magazine 4 times a year for years but been wanting to do comics stuff for online audiences as well. I’m not sure how common these will be, but hopefully I’ll manage to hit some kind of a structure in comicsing.
I’ll be accumulating random comics here: https://hempuli.com/comic/comics.php
Hi everyone! My internship is now over and while I haven’t graduated, a big step on my way into psychologisthood has now been taken.
Anyway, I didn’t manage to write much of anything here during the internship, but near the end of the year I started making some plans on what I’d like to change in my life for 2022, and I thought it’d make sense to share some of those plans, insofar as they relate to game development. Most of this is copy-pasted from my personal Discord server, but whatever.
I’ve noted that a big problem for my work & everyday life is how difficult it usually is to differentiate between work and non-work, especially on the internet. In order to improve on this, I’ll try to follow a slightly stricter schedule this year in terms of when I do what. I drafted a tentative sketch for what my workweek might look like:
Mon-Wed: Work on ESA2 and other non-Baba game projects
Wed: Stream 1 – work on ESA2 and other non-Baba game projects
Thur-Fri: Work on Baba Is You
Fri: Stream 2 – work on Baba Is You
Sat-Sun: Time off; I probably won’t be able to keep my mind off videogames so I won’t pretend that I wouldn’t do any game work here, but I’ll try to keep it very relaxed and non-work-like.
I might on some weeks switch the days around or make other changes, stream more often and so on, but it’d be nice to have a general guideline to follow that I can refer to when pondering what to do on a given day and how to spend my days.
Relating to the “other non-Baba game projects”, I have a largeish plan for 2022 that’ll be the other major non-Baba thing alongside ESA2: I want to make a small game every month this year! The idea would be that I take one idea that I’ve pondered about but not implemented and make a prototype out of it, 12 times over the year. However, my goal would be to actually have something playable, not just a rough proof-of-concept. I’m pretty excited about this concept! I might use a format similar to what Petri Purho used during the year that gave us Crayon Physics, in that even though I’ll make a game every month, I’ll only work 7 days maximum on a given game. We’ll see!
Oh yeah, also Baba Is You got its major update, Baba Make Level, last November! Kind of embarrassing that I wrote nothing about it here, but as I said in some previous post, I’ll try to get a round-up “what’s cooking” post done sometime and address all the little things I haven’t mentioned here there and then.
Happy new year!
The Switch patch is finally here! Huge apologies for things taking this long, there were some unexpected bumps on the way. The current version has some issues with a couple of the supported languages, and we’ll be running another patch soon to rectify that. Thank you for your support and patience!
Changelog:
Levels adjusted:
Hi! It’s been almost 6 months since I last posted. I intended to do a general catch-up post a long time ago, but life happened and has since kept happening.
The main thing keeping me busy right now is that I’m doing a psychology internship at a psychosis ward in a hospital. It’s busy and often stressful work, but also very intriguing and often rewarding! I’ve enjoyed it thoroughly, but it has done a number on my ability to stay up to date with videogame & blog stuff. So there. But it’ll end at the end of this year, after which I’ll return to usual(?) business.
Since now is not the end of the year, I’ll refrain from trying to force myself to write a longer post, and instead retreat to posting about this new paper puzzle type I came up with (there might be some others coming, too):
Corner meeting! It’s a pretty simple concept; I have spent some time pondering puzzle types that are built around turns/corners in lines (I think?), and this was the outcome of those ponderings.
Rules:
Puzzles:
Yes, that – good luck in 2021. Since paper puzzles have been the “thing” for me this year, I’ll end it with one more: Ilotulite (Finnish for “firework”)! This is the second attempt at the idea; the first one was more of a joke and not very good.
(Click for big!)
Here are some puzzles:
I’ve also been working on a small tool for making paper puzzles; it’s very debug-like, but might offer some use for people who want to make these kinds of things: http://www.hempuli.com/puzzlemaker.zip
Anyway, let’s hope things get better for the world next year! I’ve tried to do my part; Baba Is You’s success has allowed me to donate over USD $300,000 to charities over the past 2 years. Yay! Thanks for the support!
Finally, here’s a painting I made to celebrate New Year’s Eve:
Ok! The online level-sharing is out in public beta!
As mentioned earlier, I wanted to test a method to let people outside of Steam to also be able to check out the open beta. And now there’s a way to do exactly that! Just head to itch.io and pick up the limited-time editor build; it will only be kept up-to-date until the editor releases and has some limited utilities, but it’ll let you experience the full extent of the level-sharing beta! I understand that is still not quite comparable to being able to test the editor on a Switch, but as I said earlier, that is not entirely something I could make happen. I hope people will find this method acceptable. Thanks for your support!
You can also read the Steam announcement here.
One more thing: I set up a Twitter account for gathering level codes of levels that people found cool or interesting. Do tweet at @BabaLevels if you feel you’ve found such a level! This’ll make picking the featured levels easier in the future as well.
Things have taken longer than intended, as they tend to do, but we’re almost there! In fact enough there to start publicly testing the beta! Specifically, the “open beta” bit concerns the online level-sharing feature, that has so far been off-limits outside of the closed testing group.
Since this is the first time we’re setting up something like this and we want to get an idea of how much there is to worry about and what kind of troubles and such we’ll need to prepare for, the level-sharing is quite rudimentary initially. The way it’ll work for now is:
The main way to access these features is via the Steam beta branch system; a lot of Steam players have been able to check out the progress of the editor over the past months already, albeit without the level-sharing.
Now then, I’ve felt very bad about the fact that people not on Steam haven’t been able to access the beta; it’s especially unfortunate for Nintendo Switch™ users, since they’ve had to wait the longest for updates in general. Due to this, here’s how I plan to go forward:
Finally, thanks to all of you for your amazing support and kindness towards the project over the years! I really want to offer all of you some neat extra content and hope that the editor works and is fun to use. I also think that Baba & friends will appear in some future games, although nothing is set in stone regarding that.
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.
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 :)
More streaming! I really need to set up my standing desk again, these past days have caused stomach pains possibly partially because of all the sitting.
I managed to fix a whole bunch of small issues and add handy hotkeys and other quality-of-life features for the editor. The editor is actually starting to feel pretty nice to use, I’d say, and that’s exciting! I also added the train sprite above; not sure why, exactly, but it felt fitting.