Hempuliʼs blog

Hempuli's blog
Visit the main site

New painting!
Posted on 2026-07-10 23:08

Managed to paint after a long while of barely doing any of that; this is the first full piece I've done since 2023, and the first one since 2019 if we discount the jokey Baba paintings I did on stream 3 years ago.

This piece is heavily based on an illustration in Tove Jansson's book Comet in Moominland.

Tags: Art

Monthly update: May 2026
Posted on 2026-06-03 16:55

May happened. Not much happened during May. I was very active in terms of social life and other such things, as well as certain work-related things I can't talk about in more detail, but as far as public-facing creative work goes, I didn't get almost anything done. My devstreams have been on hold since Nordic Game Jam and as such work on both Planet Keke & ESA2 has been effectively frozen in the meantime. I'm hoping to be able to change this soon, though!!!

There was one ray of light in this cloud of unproductivity, though - I managed to finish another little 2-player boardgame, Shieldbearers! It was a lot of fun to craft the little pieces for this, although the result doesn't look very professional at all. You can check out the game here.

In completely unrelated news, I've been very heavily into Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream lately. It makes for a good thing to play in short sessions.

Tags: Regular updates, Boardgames, Pets, Other

Monthly update: April 2026
Posted on 2026-05-01 13:37

Another month gone by, it's weird how that happens. Happy May Day! April was fairly uneventful for me, with Nordic Game Jam being the biggest highlight games-wise. Lately I've struggled with keeping up with my streams, partially due to out-of-stream work requiring my attention.

In the case of NGJ it initially seemed like I wouldn't manage to finish anything - the theme of the jam was 'Nothing' and this didn't inspire me particularly much & the ideas I had beforehand that I could've tweaked to fit the theme also didn't work out. However, I had brought some boardgame components with me and on Sunday tested some simple rulesets, eventually bumping into something that seemed vaguely passable. After writing up a rules document I got to test the game with some actual players and the game proved to be surprisingly promising!

After returning home I spent some time crafting a mushroom-themed playset for this new game, prompting me to ultimately change the name to Shroompatch! You can check it out on Itch.io here.

I also managed to implement a new covemountlike on the evening of arriving in Copenhagen - Railmount! The controls are pretty clunky but overall I'm happy with the game, and some people have even said that it's their favourite of the bunch! You can play it on Itch.io.

I managed to get Planet Keke's first test build out, as planned, but it was fairly buggy in some significant ways and I've since failed to work on it more, so that process has been a but bumpy. I'll get back to it soon, I'm sure.

I also managed to patch A Solitaire Mystery - the game had some rather unfortunate bugs that had been around for way too long.

Ludum Dare also came and went with the theme 'Signal', but I was at the summer cottage at the time and thus couldn't muster the energy to try to make anything.

1 2

Tags: Games, NGJ, Covemountlikes, Planet Keke, Ludum Dare, Boardgames, Small games, Solitaire Mystery

Elastic link
Posted on 2026-04-03 20:32

It's once again been a while since I last posted a paper puzzle type. I'm a tad uncertain about Elastic link, at least in the sense that there might've been potential for a more interesting ruleset here, but the puzzles seemed to work fine so here we are. The concept is built on the concept of lines with constrained segment lengths as expressed in the second paragraph of the rules, but it was pointed out to me that the final ruleset resembles that of Herugolf.

And here come the puzzles:

The dark square should be counted as a wall; no lines can be drawn on it.

10 10 10

Tags: Paper puzzles

Monthly update: Marchbruary 2026
Posted on 2026-03-14 04:42

Not too much happened in February, so it makes sense to combine these two months even outside of timing.

I participated in the 7-Day Roguelike Challenge, and made the above game, titled █ █ ▄ █, for it. It's a chess-themed roguelike and I'm pretty happy with the result, especially now that I've refined it a bunch with post-jam updates. As the name kind of implies, it's a fairly cryptic (although ultimately also fairly minimalistic) deal.

Check it out on Itch.io!

What else, what else... Planet Keke has progressed at a very nice pace, and I decided to concentrate more heavily on it later this year to finally get the game done. I'm currently working through a to-do list of things I need to implement/fix/polish to be able to release the first test build for the game, so that's neat.

We had a very nice wintery weather for about 2 months, and I had a lot of fun walking on the ice of the nearby bay during that. Approximately 2 weeks ago the temperatures increased quite drastically, and now there's clearly spring in the air. In the current climate conditions I'm happy if I can get even 2 months of proper freezing temperatures.

The cats are doing fine, and Fondue slowly, slowly progresses on her journey towards self-confidence - I've now witnessed several instances of her being the instigator for a play-fight, batting at Vilma's butt or doing a little chase. That's great!

13 1

Tags: Pets, Games, Planet Keke, Other jams, Other, Small games, Regular updates

Monthly update: January 2026
Posted on 2026-02-02 20:10

First things first: I noticed that a watercolour piece I'm very happy with, Deep pond, was missing from the gallery, and added it in there:

January was a very quiet month. I had a good bit of minor anxiety here and there, and in general didn't really get the ball rolling on personal projects (aside from covemountlikes) until towards the end of the month; this includes my bi-weekly streams.

I'm currently once again in the frustrating mindset of having a ton of things that I'd hypothetically want to make, but having lowish motivation for any of them while also trying to avoid starting too many simultaneous projects to avoid getting in a situation where I tinker with so many separate things that nothing gets done. Thanks to the streams starting I've gotten some work done on both Planet Keke & ESA2, but I think I want to put more pressure on myself to work on the former to try to get it out of the door as soon as possible, slightly similarly to what I did with Mobile Suit Baba towards the end of 2023.

In other news, Baba Is You received a largeish bugfix/polish patch at the start of this year. The update also added some new objects for levelmakers to play with, and even some entirely new rulewords! No new levels, though. There'll need to be some additional patches to fix up things in the new patch, but I'd like to consider this the last larger patch to the game.

Oh! There're also 2 new covemountlikes - Photomount & COVEMEVOC:

Play Photomount on Itch.io

Play COVEMEVOC on Itch.io

Tags: Regular updates, Games, Baba Is You, ESA 2, Planet Keke, Art

Website update + Deltamount
Posted on 2026-01-05 23:22

I noticed that with the way I had set the tag system up, looking for posts tagged 'Art' would also bring up posts tagged 'Article' and so on, and spent some time just now fixing that. Applied the same fix to the game list & gallery, and fixed some old broken images as well. Of course this is probably of interest to no-one except me, but if that's the case, I guess I'm writing this post for myself.

Oh! Also, there's a new Covemountlike - Deltamount.

Check it out!

Be warned though, it's quite frustrating.

2 1 4

Tags: Games, Small games, Browser games, Other

2025 in review
Posted on 2025-12-30 15:43

Alright, it's time for this. I was actually going to do the year-in-review post a bit earlier, but wanted to squeeze out one more thing before accepting my fate.

2025 was a relatively slow year, with me concentrating mostly on my long-term projects (Environmental Station Alpha 2, Planet Keke, previously A Solitaire Mystery, some other things) in contrast to 2024's heavy focus on tiny bite-sized projects. In several ways this is a good thing - progress on those larger projects means that they'll be done faster. This approach just doesn't look quite as nice on a simple graph like above.

This year was also marked by several factors that impacted my ability to work. My thumb fracturing in late 2024 made me not work on games almost at all in January, and I struggled with a good bit of anxiety all the way until June or so, further slowing things down. Then in early autumn my brother died (RIP), and the aftermath from that, both emotional and otherwise, has taken its toll. I've actually been tasked with going through some photos etc from my brother, and this has been fascinating in its own ways (if a bit morbid at times).

The only really substantial (not really that substantial) new release in the first half of the year was The Plumber Thing: Early Years. I made it during a period of anxiety, which affected my desire to properly polish it, but for a small joke game it's solid enough. I've had TPT:EY's core concept vaguely hovering on my to-do lists for a long while (I should actually go through my old to-do lists to see approximately how long), so in some sense getting it done was extra meaningful to me, despite how small the game is.

I was feeling a bit annoyed at the low release count for this year, and decided to implement 1-2 of my remaining Covemountlike ideas before the year's end. So here's Covelink, the concept of which I've actually been developing for a puzzle platformer for a longer while but decided to co-opt for the sokoban format. The puzzles don't feel like my best work, but I'm happy that I got the game done. You can try the game out here.

The big highlight of the year was of course A Solitaire Mystery's Steam release, even though it doesn't feature on the graph due to having been released on Itch a year prior. I'm still working on some more updates for the game, but the Steam launch went mostly well and I'm glad about the positive attention the game got, including the Experimental Games Showcase feature at the start of the year. Obviously huge thanks to Hazelstorm for the OST and solitaire work, and to knexator, X_Sheep & Kusane for their solitaire work.

The remaining two videogame releases, Baba Is Quiz & Feast Thine Eyes On Flowers, were both made while not feeling too well, but BIQ I'm fairly happy with and it seems like people have appreciated it as well. FTEOF feels more like a truly unfinished thing so while I guess I'm counting it as a release, it doesn't really mentally 'count' in the same way these others do. No boardgames and only a handful of paper puzzles this year - I actually have 2 boardgames near the finish line (I posted about one of them in January) but neither is quite ready for release.

I've been pondering about my wishes & hopes regarding the coming year a good bunch, at least in the context of my own work. This has been motivated by the aforementioned annoyance at this year's visible productivity, I suppose. Here's an unordered list of things I'd want to see next year when it comes to my work:

- This is maybe more a general future thing than a 2026 thing, but I'm getting really worn out by the work on ESA2 and Planet Keke. I suppose it's possible that the latter could be finished next year, but I'm not setting any hard goals just yet. I'd just want to have a slot for another larger project.

- I've been occasionally missing making Covemountlikes, so I think I'll return to them next year. I'll need to avoid concentrating too much on them, lest it eat into my motivation to make other things, but it'd be nice to get a couple small puzzlers out here and there (+ I have enough ideas for several).

- I have multiple possibly-feasible ideas for 7DRL, so maybe next year is the year I actually manage to finish an entry!

- There are a couple old ideas I'd like to revisit, one being the above Spelunky -esque sci-fi platformer roguelike concept, another being a more refined version of Sublunar Vessel, a Ludum Dare entry from 2017 that I'm fond of despite it not being released in a very playable state. It's oddly reminiscent of UFO50's Campanella 2.

- I spent a good amount of time this year thinking about boardgame designs without managing to finalize any; it'd be nice to get a couple more of those to the finish line, and in particular I'd want to work on my design process so that I'd actually feel more confident in setting up a ruleset for a 3+ -player game.

There's more, but as usual it's probably best to try to keep my expectations at least reasonably reasonable. I won't be able to do everything I'd want to, anyway.

Fondue's hindleg issues also added to the real-life worries of the year, but that's long past gone and the cats have been a joy like usual. Here's to another good year for them!

Happy new year!

27 7 16

Tags: Games, Covemountlikes, ESA 2, Planet Keke, Small games, Browser games, Pets, Other, Regular updates, Article, Boardgames, Solitaire

Monthly update: Septoctovember 2025
Posted on 2025-12-05 03:14

Welp, it's been another couple months without a monthly update. Things have been progressing in a fairly similar manner compared to when I last made an update in August, but at the very least there's been progress.

Planet Keke plods along, slowly but surely. I'm atm flip-flopping really hard on how good I feel about the game in general - at times it feels like a mess, and at other times it feels like an interesting thing. At the very least the resulting game will probably require the players to have some understanding for slightly janky design.

ESA 2 is actually doing relatively well at the moment! I've had more motivation to work on it, and I've tried to plan things ahead a bit to avoid running into certain issues I've noticed happening before when I just blindly add things. I'm now pretty much done with the main progression through a new area, with only the bossfight left to be done.

Ludum Dare came and went, I made this tiny boat scene but finished nothing else. Alas. There was also ProcJam 2025 that went by recently, and 7DFPS will be upon us soon; I'd have ideas for all these but gathering motivation to actually commit to them is very difficult.

I noticed that the listing for my boardgames was missing two games from last year; those are now in there as well.

The cats are doing great! Fondue has been becoming increasingly active as of late, actually playing and having zoomies, it's wonderful!

2 4

Tags: Regular updates, Pets, Boardgames, Games, Happenings

The Bard
Posted on 2025-11-28 06:27

I made a serious comic! This is a very rare occurrence for me; I've had the idea bouncing in my head for a while but it took me a long time to get started and then a good while actually implementing the comic (mainly because of the poem on page 3). Without further ado:

I need to make a proper blog update sometime soon as well. Until then!