Hempuli's blog

So then, there’s a bunch of other stuff that’s happened gamedev-wise, so let’s list some images!

– Baba’s “programming” system is complicated enough that it allows for making games inside Baba! They lack certain vital stuff but here’re Space Invader, Snake & a platformer! The Space Invader thing was done a longer time ago so it might not work quite as nicely right now with the layout it has there, but the idea should be reproducible. Baba also has a Twitter account now, @babaisyou_!

pic.twitter.com/gzUAFKsGM8

— Baba Is You (@babaisyou_) July 18, 2018

– Some more pics of the game. The bottom-most image with the “Empty Is You” showcases one of the more hard-to-grasp elements of the game and it’ll be fun to see if people get them.

– I’ve been toying around with text generation using Markov chain -based techniques. It’s a lot of fun, and I’ve generated stuff using movie scripts, cookbook recipes, MtG cards, airline catalogue ads, motivational sentences and book/movie titles. I currently have two engines, one of which is more customized and works better on longer texts, and another that’s less sophisticated but more chaotic and thus a good fit for short texts.

I’ve set up two Twitter accounts for posting generated stuff: @chaingenerator miscellaneous text and @MTGmarkov for MtG cards only. Like so:

192. Slawn

OP but neat & nearly coherent! pic.twitter.com/2wXFLRPeL1

— MtG Markov (@MtGmarkov) April 10, 2018

THÉODEN continues weeping, not listening. Wincing, he straightens up, as if to mask his infirmity.

DUMBLEDORE
Welcome! Welcome to another year at Hogwarts

— LotR Cookbook (@chaingenerator) July 4, 2018

– I participated in the Nordic Game Jam a couple weeks after GDC! I was still kind of exhausted from GDC and Stumblehill was causing me stress so I didn’t manage to concentrate very well, but I nevertheless managed to make these little prototypes. One is a gam jam simulator showing little jammers walk around the venue with game ideas, fulfilling their basic needs. There’s no gameplay but it’s fun to watch. The other is a cooking game prototype where you can make dishes that get named procedurally. Pretty neat but the idea was too meny-heavy to be fun to implement at a jam. You can find both games on my itch.io page!

I streamed some yesterday (a week late), and while I didn’t get to check that many boxes from the to-do-list, good progress was done anyway. Loading, placing and saving objects works again in the level editor, I added some water effects (still barebones) and implemented the basics of enemy interaction. I also made some endgame stuff for Baba.

UGhghg, even when disregarding the sloppy weekly progress updates, I’ve been extremely bad at keeping this blog up to date with things I’ve been doing! Let’s try to fix that! Here’re some things I’ve made during the past several months:

– I made a game for Ludum Dare 41! It’s called Super Metabolism Bros, and it’s a kind of a mix of Dwarf Fortress -like real-time strategy with autonomous agents and platforming. The idea ended up being very rough and buggy, but it was a fun little thing and part of my long-enduring fascination with autonomous agents in games and pathfinding. FrankieSmileShow played the game on-stream and it was a fun time. I had a lot more plans (bacteria, at least) but didn’t have time for those.

– I had my 2-week Summer holiday a week ago, and during it I toyed around with shaders to create this fake 3D effect. It’s very satisfying to create this kind of stuff, although whether it’ll become anything or not will have to be seen. It’d be neat to make a cardgame or a boardgame with this style! (Alexis Kennedy’s Cultist Simulator definitely inspired me a lot)

– Stumblehill is done! It was featured as a part of Humble Bundle’s Monthly Bundle for July. There were some bugs at launch but they should be gone now, although I do plan to update the game a bit more before I call it fully finished. All in all, the project was fun and while I left things very much too late, the result turned out to be fairly neat. This also helped me a lot to get a feel for digital painting, although digital animation is something that feels way beyond me. Massive thanks to Anna Magdalino for the audio and Lucy Green for the writing!

– After a lengthy break, I’ve returned to work on ESA 2! However, because of various reasons I’ve decided to re-do the game from nearly scratch. I’m going to reuse assets where I can, but it’s still a bunch of work. Sorry about that! But I think the game will benefit from rethought. I’m currently setting up the editor and basics of the engine, but it shouldn’t be too long until I’ll be able to get to work on the actual map again.

– Also, I’ve finally updated ESA 1! Some bugs have been fixed, you can now skip the end credits if you’ve seen them already, and there have been some optimizations to the level loading times that should help especially older computers to handle the game. Many of these little changes have been made with speedrunners in mind.

– Baba Is You progresses onwards, somewhat slower now but nevertheless. I think I’ll do a separate post of interesting Baba gifs and whatnot in the future, but not mentioning it in this general update would be odd. On the video you can heard some tracks I’ve composed for the game.

I’ll also be participating in the No More Sweden game jam again this year. It’ll be held in the beginning of August in Malmö, Sweden. It’ll be good to meet some friends and maybe make some jam games. :)

Today more work was done on ESA 2’s new editor; layers are now back in along with copying multiple tiles. A new feature is being able to select multiple tiles in the tileset and placing them simultaneously; this’ll make it easier to create multi-tile structures. I also added support for animated tiles and a couple other things. Nothing massively flashy but still, good progress. Hopefully next time I’ll get to work on the gameplay side of things.

As for Baba, I tidied the intro screen up some, adding a neat little background effect and moving some text around to make things nicer and more consistent. Again, pretty small things in themselves, but the effect of having the game look nicer is very noticeable (to me!)

In other news, I talked about Baba Is You at the Jam Jam in Sappee, Finland yesterday. Good fun. My IGF prize things also arrived, I’ll try to post a picture if I remember. Also also, my Summer holidays started! This is very much welcome.