Text generator! Tags: Games, Other, Procedural generation, Small games Weekly-1 progress post #105: More maps Tags: Games, Baba Is You, Streaming, Regular updates Weekly-2 progress post #104: New map! Tags: Games, Baba Is You, Plans, Streaming, Regular updates Weekly-3 progress post #103: Level intros Tags: Games, Baba Is You, Streaming, Regular updates Chnakess Tags: Games, No More Sweden, Small games, Happenings News! And stuff! Part 2 Tags: Games, Baba Is You, Happenings, Nordic Game Jam, Procedural Generation, Small games Weekly progress post #102: Basics Tags: Games, Baba Is You, ESA 2, Streaming, Regular updates News! And stuff! Part 1 Tags: Games, ESA 2, Baba Is You, Ludum Dare, No More Sweden, Other, Plans, Small games Weekly progress post #101: Good progress Tags: Games, ESA 2, Baba Is You, Regular updates, Streaming, Other jams Weekly progress post #100: Back to ESA 2 Tags: Games, ESA 2, Regular updates, Streaming Pages
Posted on 2018-08-29 05:31
I polished up a markov chain generator I’ve used to generate e.g. book titles to make it more approachable, and here it is! You’ll have to gather more source texts on your own, but the engine itself should be quite user-friendly, if a bit bare-bones.
GET THE GENERATOR
The generator is also open-source; the engine itself was made with Multimedia Fusion 2, but the generation agorithm is pure lua so you can try to figure out what’s going on there if you so please.
Posted on 2018-08-16 04:46
I’ve actually made good headway at getting back on track with these updates – this is the third stream this week! I had implemented a simple map mockupping tool yesterday, and used it today to plan out the map. It’s hard to say how balanced things are, but I’d say that the situation is way better now than just a couple days ago. I even managed to re-do some long-standing problem levels, with the help of people in the chat. This was the first time I announced a stream using @babaisyou_, and I think that showed in that the chat had more people than usual. Maybe? The stream ended with a little bit of settings menu work.
It’s looking a lot like I’ll manage to catch up to my schedule this week! However, next week I’ll be away so there’ll be no stream, and as a result I’ll have to do a double stream sometime soon. With how useful these streams have been, this shouldn’t be a bad thing, however.
Posted on 2018-08-14 04:10
A second streaming day right after the first! Today I redrew the world map of Baba to account for the increased screen size (from 480×480 to 854×480). After that I polished yesterday’s level intro screen a bit and started some work on making the pause menu neater. I feel that I’m starting to get fairly close to a point where I’m reasonably happy with the content of the game, but there are some of these cases of visual polish still in the way, as well as a particular map design issue I need to tackle (along with some endgame content stuff but those feel less pressing since they’re not relevant for most people playing the game, not at first at least.)
I’m still 2 streams behind so there may be more streaming this week! Perhaps I can get all these smaller issues
in Baba sorted out before the end of the week? That’d be great!
Posted on 2018-08-13 04:23
Wow, the plan for weekly streams didn’t go too well. New try!!
This month is going to be very busy for Baba and thus I want to work on it even while streaming; ESA 2 will have to wait a little while longer. Today I worked on implementing an intro for the levels, seen above. This far you’ve just been plopped into the levels without fanfare, with the level name hovering in the top-left corner. Now, though, you’ll get a fancy text in the middle of the screen (with a bugged level number, no less!) In the past days I’ve been updating the game to use a widescreen ratio instead of the old square shape, and together these changes have added a lot to the polishedness of the game. Sweet! Now just to fix that level numbering…
Posted on 2018-08-07 03:31
No More Sweden 2018 was last weekend, and it was a fairly good time. The venue, STPLN in Malmö, was sweet as usual and managed to be generally not too warm despite the general temperature. I even got to swim in the ocean – there’s a really nice large pier nearby and the water was really comfortably warm.
Anyway, I managed to finish some stuff despite taking it easy and spending a lot of time just chilling and playing boardgames. My themes were Sand Dunes and Chain reaction, which led me initially down the path of creating a cellular automata -style terraforming/citybuilding thing. I didn’t get very far, but here’s a neat landscaping thing:
My plans changed abruptly when someone (whose name I don’t remember :( ) sitting near me showed their idea of a turn-based snake game with the objective being defeating all enemies rather than eating fruit. Seeing this made me think of some concepts regarding roguelikes and chess pieces, and I got the concept of combining chess and snake in my head. I felt slightly bad about drawing so directly from someone else’s idea, but I really wanted to try this concept and ended up making it my entry. The game’s called Chnakess and I think it goes in a fairly different direction than a more general snake-with-enemies would have gone.
The game’s essentially a puzzle game where you try to eat all the chess pieces as the snake. I managed to create several different scenarios with different layouts, and although there are some bugs I think the result is pretty solid as far as 48-hour chill gamejam things go.
So yeah, all in all a very nice weekend. This month will be extraordinarily busy so these little moments of possible relaxation are especially valuable. If I have an empty moment somewhere I might update Chnakess a bit to add more chess elements, such as castling. We’ll see.
Posted on 2018-07-23 00:29
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_!
https://twitter.com/babaisyou_/status/1019692763653312518
– 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:
https://twitter.com/MtGmarkov/status/983508254528503808
https://twitter.com/chaingenerator/status/1014547954324135936
– 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!
Posted on 2018-07-22 22:33
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.
Posted on 2018-07-22 18:27
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. :)
Posted on 2018-07-01 07:03
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.
Posted on 2018-06-26 04:49
Today I worked on a new level editor for the new take on ESA 2. Things went pretty swimmingly, and in 3-and-some hours I managed to implement basic tile placement & room creating, saving and loading. Next up will be layers, quality-of-life stuff for tile placement and object placement. I can’t say I’d be massively hyped about doing all this again, but it’s a promising start. Let’s hope the development keeps going at a good pace!
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