Hempuli's blog

Streamed again! I’ve been adding/fixing various things in Baba for consistency and to prepare for the eventual level editor. Today I polished a system that displays the above visual effect if the player would create a loop the game can’t resolve.

I also started working on the dialogue system of ESA2. That went surprisingly smoothly, I’m glad. I’ll try to go for a less rigid speech bubble -type design this time.

Switch patch notes for the new version!

Fixes & tweaks:

– Promoted Skull House to an extra level
– Added Lovely House to where Skull House used to be
– Some underlying work for potential future features
– The Linux build should work again
– Replaced Secure Cottage with Fireplace
– New level: Pillarwork! Located where Fireplace used to be
– New option to disable particle effects
– Shuffled levels a bit in Cavern
– Fixed a colourization error in one of the endings
– Fixed the area completion effect not staying in the correct place in some cases
– Made background particles appear & disappear correctly when toggling the corresponding option in the settings menu
– You can now adjust the game’s window size when in windowed mode by pressing Control + 1/2/3 etc (this might become a proper settings option eventually)
– Fixed a crash in Ultimate Maze (probably not fully)
– Reduced Garden’s required level count for clearing
– Fixed background particles in one particular case appearing wrong
– Added 3 new levels! I’ll try to refrain from adding any more because that’s not very elegant, but here we are for now. You can find one of them in Rocket Trip as a variant for Horror Story.
– Changed “Force default colours” to “Force high-contrast colours” and made the setting use a slightly altered palette. This’ll be adjusted further in the future if needed.
– “Fixed” a bug with Empty (that is, added a solution that doesn’t fix it fully but makes it less of an issue)
– Started implementing a larger code structure related to Empty in preparation for future use and to fix a particular bug
– Swapped the order of Garden’s extra levels since it makes much more sense that way
– Made control icon positioning work even if the player adjusts the zoom type during gameplay
– Added a pause menu control hint to Where Do I Go?
– Fixed level numbering in a lategame area
– Fixed the level cursor not recognizing a level in certain situations
– Fixed the undo & restart tips appearing wrong
– Got All This Stuff Here completely redesigned! The old puzzle was broken in multiple ways and caused crashes. The replacement is called Ruined Orchard.
– Adventurers redesigned; the idea is the same but in a less frustrating configuration
– Actually fixed the undo/restart message
– Fixed multiple syntaxes that worked despite not being supposed to (Baba Not Is You and so on)
– Fixed completed level outline effect appearing wrong for some players
– Made certain directional rulewords work slightly more consistently
– Made certain secrets behave more consistently
– Fixed a rare inconcistency in how Tele works
– Changed the way the game writes text in preparation for potential translations
– Fixed a situation where an object didn’t have a corresponding word
– Added a safety measure in cases where the game doesn’t know where to load the player into
– Fixed an issue where the game skipped the intro in certain circumstances
– Fixed an issue with undoing a Floating object being destroyed
– Fixed the area completion effect not staying in the right position in certain cases
– Fixed a case where the pause menu might not render text properly
– The game checks certain rules more thoroughly when you start a level
– Fixed a very very rare crash that mostly affected only my own development work
– Added a safety feature that makes the game not break if the player’s files are encoded in ANSI and not UTF-8
– Fixed the final instance of inconsistent level placement
– Fixed a couple cornercases with  conditional rules
– Made certain lategame visual elements easier to read
– Fixed a very specific functionality related to Open/Shut

Level adjustments:

– Dead End
– Lock the Door
– Vital Ingredients
– A Way Out?
– Another Way
– Ghost Friend
– Pillarwork
– Entropy
– Horror Story
– Trapped
– Heavy Cloud
– Torn Apart
– Tangle
– Grand Stream
– Tectonic Movements
– Across
– Power Generator
– Bottleneck (adjusted to be slightly more forgiving)
– Seeking Acceptance
– Lovely House (removed a potential red herring)
– Skull House (removed a potential red herring)
– Heavy Words (removed a confusing extra structure)
– Got All This Stuff Here (see above)
– Adventurers (see above)
– Automaton
– Entropy
– Parade
– ???
– Condition
– Rocky Road (tiny readability improvement)
– Thicket (made Make’s functionality easier to figure out)
– Meta (just a small readability adjustment)
– Hostile Environment (not extremely happy about this adjustment)
– Delicate Star
– One-way Entrance
– Sky Hold

Whoa, would you look at that! I managed to update Environmental Station Alpha! There were some features that I had semi-promised to implement + bugs introduced in the previous update that I wanted to get rid of, so here we went. I streamed the process, since streaming is often a force that enables me to finish these kinds of tasks.

You can find the details here: https://steamcommunity.com/gid/103582791437735114/announcements/detail/1603756162536029681

It’s real! I promise!! Now that Baba is out, keeping a weekly schedule could technically be easier(…?)

I’ve streamed ESA 2 development a couple times again and progress has actually been fairly good! Still in the early stages of the… remake? Let’s call it a remake. But the features I’ve added have mostly felt pretty nice.