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:
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 streamed Baba Is You development to see if I still feel. The editor trudges onward, and during this stream I implemented a bunch of polishing touches and fixed many smaller bugs. It’s a terrible never-ending swamp of things to do but at the same time I feel like we’re reasonably close.
I was planning to stream ESA 2 as well, but wanted to keep the stream reasonably short and ended up not doing that after all.
One thing I need to concentrate on sometime soon is work on the two new levelpacks that’ll be released with the editor; I’ve been keeping them on hold for a couple months now and especially the “New Adventures” pack is lagging behind pretty badly by now. Similarly, I’d like to get at least 2 more tunes done for Baba and those take time to get going; I hope I can get them implemented in time.
Streamed some 5 hours tonight, fixing a whole bunch of issues in Baba Is You, but also taking the time to implement a bit of stuff for ESA 2 as well! I’m trying to avoid the issue I ran into previously where my enemy designs are overly complicated and all-purpose and as a result the level design becomes difficult. I’m still kind of learning the scale of the new 8×8 tile size – I haven’t fully internalized how high the player can jump and seeing which passages will feel too cramped and which in turn are too open is tough. Still, progress is progress!
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.
Took a bit of a break from streaming! Got back to it a week or so ago, although I’ve still been somewhat low on energy. Today I did a longer 6-hour stream and got a lot of stuff done in Baba, including the above word “Feeling”, some additions to the object colouring system, bugfixes, and more. There was a nicely active set of viewers throughout and that helped a lot with motivation, too!
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.
Monday, so another stream! I was quite tired at first but things got going anyway. It feels like I didn’t work on any single more important issue, but there was a lot of smaller polishing/reworking/bugfixing done on Baba, and ESA 2 got some new basic tiles to decorate the first area, seen above. I meant to create some new enemies for ESA 2, but Baba’s workload & my baseline tiredness were too much. As a nice thing, the ESA 2 menu things I *checks* did mention in the previous post got implemented fairly painlessly. Time to get that pause menu rolling!
Today was more of a Baba stream than an ESA 2 stream; I implemented some missing features for the new editor along with the Seldom and Often words seen above. I’ll soon get to the point where I need to start considering how to add gamepad controls for the editor, and wow will that be a tough job.
On ESA 2’s side, I mostly worked on the pause menu layout and drew some new tiles for the first area. I was going to implement more of the menu, but realized that I do want to handle certain menu-related code properly from the get-go instead of using hackier solutions, and shied away.
The bestiary(‘s skeleton) is back! And this time I could even reuse the old assets for it, yay. I meant to work a bit on the pause menu on today’s stream, but got scared away by how hairy certain text-rendering issues were.
In Baba Is You, I fixed some lagginess and implemented a system where the player needs to play through their level in order to upload it. Working on the editor is generally exhausting but today was a pretty productive day in that regard.
