Hempuli's blog

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.