Posts with tag 'Ludum Dare':
Monthly update: April 2025
Posted on 2025-04-27 17:34
I was at Nordic Game Jam 2025 at the beginning of April and had a good time apart from some anxiety troubles. In fact as far as social interaction goes, I think this was one of the nicer NGJs for me in several years! I even managed to make a small game thing, seen above: Feast Thine Eyes on Flowers! It's a simple gardening toy where you can plant seeds and watch them grow into randomized plants, then pick a specific plant and plant its seeds to get slightly-mutated versions of it.
Ludum Dare 57 happened to be on the same weekend, which was a bit of a bummer, but after NGJ I spent some time in my hotel room updating FTEoF and then submitted it to LD as well. The Ludum Dare version adds slots in which you can store flowers, the ability to splice two flowers together, and a little secret you can find to "win" the game. Still very simple but pretty nice to look at, I'd say!
This blogpost is coming in late enough that we already got the results, too. Only 363 Compo submissions, which explains the semi-high placement in several categories, but I'm still quite happy! Hopefully next time I'll have time & energy to make something more substantial.
Check the game out on Itch.io (Windows only)
And then for something less nice. Hostmonster, the company which I've used both as a webhost & domain provider since the beginning of this website, recently merged with Bluehost, and now that the services have been transferred over to the latter, I've immediately noticed issues that make me want to switch over to a different company (preferably a non-US one, considering everything). I'm still evaluating options, but once I'm done with that, I'll start the process of transferring both the domain & the webhosting services elsewhere. This feels extra nasty because I haven't done it before and there's a *lot* of stuff on here; also I think my Hostmonster account was old enough that it had some benefits not available for newer accounts, and I'm not looking forward to finding out if this is true. Oh well, I guess it was inevitable.
To end on a happier note, a longtime gamedev friend, FrankiePixelShow, released a body horror RPG game called Look Outside! Frankie has made a lot of cool stuff over the years, and Look Outside has seemed to strike a chord with players and it's been really cool to see the game garner positive attention!
Watch the trailer here
Check Look Outside out on Steam
I've had some motivation problems lately, but hopefully some stuff will pick up soon. Planet Keke and ESA2 have continued their slow but steady pace forward, which is nice even if progress has otherwise been scarce.
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Tags: Games, Other, Plans, Happenings, Nordic Game Jam, Ludum Dare, ESA 2, Small games, Regular updates, Planet Keke
Portal Field & Doooors update
Posted on 2024-11-17 19:48
I've had Portal Field pretty much finished for months now, but I've been thinking that I'd like to refine it just a *smidge* before putting it out there; ultimately I ended up not worrying about that after all and just released it, warts and all. The rulebook has gotten some good criticism already so I'll be refining it post-release sometime soon, but it's nice to have the game available in any case.
Download the rules on Itch.io!
I also realized that I could refine Doooors, the puzzle game I released in 2010, fairly easily and did just that! The game has suffered from extremely annoyingly floaty physics and various other nuisances that I for whatever reason never bothered to fix and that take away from the puzzle-solving experience; with this refining I tried to finetune the physics and do some mostly-minor adjustments to make the gameplay feel better. I also added the game remembering your progress. Hopefully Doooors is now a better game to experience, awful title aside.
Check out the new version!
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Tags: Games, Boardgames, Small games, Old games, Ludum Dare
Bits and bobs from Wordpress archives Tags: Games, Ludum Dare, Small games, ESA, Cloud Realm, Other Neltris & stuff Tags: Games, Nordic Game Jam, Ludum Dare, Small games, Browser games, Happenings, Plans, Streaming Monthly update: Marchpril 2024 Tags: Games, Pets, Happenings, Small games, Nordic Game Jam, Ludum Dare, Other, Plans, Regular updates, Covemountlikes, Browser games Cylinders of the Wise Tags: Games, Boardgames, Ludum Dare Once in Space 2022 & Cavern of Flight v1.3 Tags: Games, Ludum Dare, Small games, Old games, Other Keke in the Caves of Peril! Tags: Games, Small games, Ludum Dare Ludum Dare 43 results! Tags: Games, Ludum Dare, Small games, Other Weekly-12 progress post #111: Rules Tags: Games, Baba Is You, Streaming, Regular updates, Ludum Dare, Plans
Posted on 2024-07-28 18:29
I've been transferring images on the blog from Imgur to my own webspace to avoid a situation where something gets lost forever due to Imgur breaking/deciding to remove it. I looked through the images uploaded to Wordpress over the years, and there were some fun little images I hadn't posted on the blog, which I now put up in their own retroactive blogposts. See here:
April 2010 - An unposted Paradise Fort screenshot
November 2013 - Two images from an old version of Cloud Realm 2
April 2014 - More Cloud Realm 2, plus me at a student party
May 2014 - Early development of a better Cloud Realm 2 engine
June 2014 - Pictures of ESA 1's final boss
Posted on 2024-04-21 15:49
I didn’t end up finishing anything on time for either Ludum Dare nor NGJ (not that I tried, either, for the latter) but I did start a little side project that feels promising, so I guess I’ll be tinkering with that a bunch for a bit. I’ll post more about it when it gets to a slightly more complete state.
However, unrelated to either jam, I made a tiny silly browser game called Neltris and put it on Itch on the Thursday-Friday night! It’s… silly but I quite like it.
You can play it here!
I’ve been failing to get the weekly streams going this year, first due to being sick, then due to Fondue arriving, then due to laziness, then due to moving and then due to Nordic Game Jam [plus some other reasons not listed here]. I have some more stuff in the horizon that’ll affect my ability to stream, but outside of specific events preventing me from streaming I need to step up the game a bit, especially ESA2 really needs that.
Posted on 2024-04-09 04:11
I haven’t updated the blog in a bit, but this time there’s actually a reason for this! I’ve been intending to eventually migrate my blog away from WordPress, and have been setting up a homemade thing for viewing posts & then migrating old posts into the new system. I vaguely thought that after starting this process, the next blogpost would already be in the new system and as such didn’t log in here for a bit. But it’s been long enough (partially because I don’t entirely trust how good my PHP/PDO code is) without the new blog coming online, so let’s make a normal update here instead.
First of all, A Solitaire Mystery is now fully out! It boasts 23 solitaires at the moment, but we do have plans to add more at a later date. You can get it for USD $3 on Itch.io:
That’s my first proper Löve2D release, too! There are a lot of little odd spots in the codebase, but overall I think I’ve built a relatively nice basic system for future lua games. Thanks to Hazelstorm and knexator for the guest solitaires & to Hazelstorm for the excellent music!
In other news, the number of Covemountlikes has reached a whopping 16! All of them (plus RUDE CHESS and IT’S A BLOCK-PUSHING GAME) can be found in this collection!
Also, I’ll be moving to a new apartment soon! It’s exciting although I worry about the cats a bit, both in terms of logistics and especially Fondue getting used to the new place. We’ll see.
Ludum Dare 55 will be at the end of the week, and Nordic Game Jam a week after that. We’ll see what happens with those…
Posted on 2023-05-05 02:02
Don’t mind the silly name: it’s what I ended up with with the boardgame I posted about earlier. I got to playtest the game a bit and it seemed solid enough as it was, so I decided to call it done and put it on Itch.io. I also submitted it to Ludum Dare #53, which feels a bit silly in hindsight.
Check it out on Itch.io!
Posted on 2022-11-06 09:32
Once in Space! That’s the game that originally prompted me to set up the hempuli.com website! I remember Nifflas helpfully making me a simple HTML example for how I could format the page for the game, and I’ve been using that as a template ever since (with some adjustments over the years). That was a hugely helpful HTML file!
Anyway, Once in Space was one of my original “platformers-with-a-twist”, alongside games like Timerocketxby, Flickerstrings & GENERIC Platformer. I was quite fond of it, although the initial 2007 version received some harsh-but-valid criticism from a JayIsGames.com reviewer due to how rough the game was to play.
Eventually, in 2011 (I thought it was earlier), I decided to remake the game. For various reasons that version was ultimately kind of lost in time and space, despite being much much more refined game design -wise than the 2007 original. I’ve been thinking of updating it for a new release for years, but now that has actually happened!
In other news, I put Cavern of Flight, one of my highest-quality Ludum Dare entries on Itch.io earlier this year; the game had had a very unfortunate visual bug ever since release where respawning after dying would commonly require you to hard-restart the program. I fixed that for the Itch.io release, but there were a couple additional issues with its design that I didn’t bother fixing at the time. However, while I was still excited about putting OiS 2022 out, I went and actully fixed those issues, making the game a much less rough experience to finish. So that’s two old games now available, better than ever!
Download Once In Space 2022 on Itch.io here!
Download Cavern of Flight v1.3 on Itch.io here!
Posted on 2022-05-13 00:34
Hey! Another new game only a week after the last! Now to be fair, this one I made originally a year ago for Ludum Dare 48. However, I’ve since added polish, undo, new levels, music and so on, so this new release is quite a bit neater than the original. Unfortunately only Windows is supported, though.
CHECK IT OUT
Posted on 2019-01-01 21:32
Trying to learn to use this new block system of WordPress’…
So! LD #43 ended last weekend, and the results are in. My game, Ludum Dare Simulator, fared fairly well, all things considered! There were 765 Compo entries in total, and my entry managed top100 in 4 categories:
- 15th in Humor
- 23rd in Innovation
- 58th in Overall
- 88th in Fun
I guess I really banked on that humour value. Anyway, I’m pretty happy with the results! It’d be fun to make another overly ambitious LD game one day a lá Apocalypse Adventure and Badland Quest, but we’ll see when that happens; it’s not like I don’t have well enough stuff in the works already.
GET THE GAME
Also check out these other entries:
- Devil Cult Party by the LD master FrankieSmileShow
- The Sacrifice by caeonosphere
Anyway, happy new year! Now back to work on Baba, once I’ve played some games…
Posted on 2018-12-12 03:56
Huh, WordPress looks very different now. I kinda miss the old system. Anyway! After a month+ of no game development streams, I managed to implement some Baba rule changes on-stream today. Progress was very smooth, although at the very end I realized a rather unfortunate implication of the system I was implementing that I’ll have to mull over. Still, very nice! I also played a couple Ludum Dare entries to close the stream off.
The end of the year is closing in on us, and that means I’ll have to get Baba to its finalized state sometime soon! Especially the audio is something I’ve been overlooking for too long now – gotta have to concentrate my efforts on that.