Hempuli's blog

So! Another year has passed. After 2022’s productivity, 2023 followed more on the footsteps of 2020 and 2021 in that I got very very few games released. However, this comparison feels somewhat unfair because I was still working on multiple projects throughout the year, and Mobile Suit Baba was the fruit of those efforts, ending up being quite a bit more ambitious than I initially planned. I also worked on Noita again, adding some more content. Thanks to Petri & Olli for letting me do that!

2023 also saw me getting into boardgame development more seriously. I’ve been dabbling with trying to make my own boardgames/cardgames since childhood (I have about 5 different imitations of Magic: the Gathering & the Pokémon Trading Card Game I made back then stashed in a cupboard), and Petri Purho (from the Nolla Games team) and Erik Svedäng (developer of Blueberry Garden & Else Heart.break()) inspired me further by making boardgames at various game jams. However, during adulthood I’ve never really gotten past the initial stages of design due to impatience, lack of skill, and other factors. Me and Petri developed 2 boardgames together somewhere around 2013, but the first time I got close to actually releasing something was with Piiri in 2020, although that too went unfinished at the time.

Considering the above, me being able to develop so many boardgames to a state where I felt confident enough to put them available online last year felt really nice! Mostly the boardgame design motivation came from procrastination regarding videogame development, but I can’t complain too much about that since the end result was still creative work being done on something I was happy with. The impatience and lack of skill are still present, though, and as such my boardgames have stayed very carefully in the land of 2-player abstracts. Maybe this year I’ll go further?

2023 was also the year of books for me. I started trying to read more in 2022, and once the habit was formed, it was great to get through a lot of new stuff after years and years of re-reading the sam books over and over. In total I read 24 titles last year, although some were very short affairs.

Anyway, here’s the total list of stuff I released last year:

• Baba Files Taxes
• Cylinders of the Wise
• Obsidian Sentinels
• Malsymmetric (technically unfinished because I wasn’t happy with the design)
• Equal measures (paper puzzle)
• Piiri (mostly designed in 2020)
• Kepi
• Elder Dance (technically unfinished because the rules were broken)
• Kurote
• Gnome Thicket
• DIAGORT
• Flatdog Scuffle
• Mobile Suit Baba
• LITSilly (paper puzzle)

Last but not least, 2023 was also the year I finally got a pet, although a better term might be that a pet was got-ed at me. Vilma has been getting more used to me and my apartment, and lately I seem to have figured out what kind of scratching she likes, and she has also started to spend more time lying next to me while I sleep. It’s funny how years-long plans to get a dog turned out like this. Oh well!

For 2024, I have plans to try to release more tiny games like in 2022. However, ESA 2 and Planet Keke are on the table still and especially ESA 2 needs all the attention I can give, so I’ll have to be mindful of that when I decide to dedicate time to sideprojects. I’m sure something’ll work out, though.

Off to a new year we go!

I made one more cover & comic for our student organization’s magazine! Technically there’s still one more issue coming out before the end of the year, but I doubt I’ll be participating in it due to the whole “I’ve graduated now” thing.

You can read the comic here, but do note that it’s all in Finnish!

I was dogsitting at my parents’ place and the recent rainy weather had left the area chock-full of mushrooms. Nice!

I guess I could try doing a monthly update, since weekly updates were clearly too difficult for me and several of the past blogposts have been kind of general “what’s been going on” style affairs.

1: Kepi

I released another boardgame! The main motivator for making it was that I had these wooden sticks that felt difficult to use because they were cylindrical and as such rolled really easily. I bought a cheap “Yankee scarf” for 1,5€ in the local dollar store equivalent to help with the rolling, and in the end was very satisfied with the overall look. The game turned out to have some stalemating issues, but a rule addition suggested by pinchazumos seems to have fixed that. Thanks! You can download the rules for free here.

2: First Planet Keke song

I almost-finished the first tune for this game, and decided to make a proper preview video to showcase it! There are little details that I still want to adjust in the song, but overall I’m happy with it. The game has also been coming along pretty nicely, although there’s plenty left to do.

3: Watercolours

I had a small notebook and decided to do some little paintings in it. It was fun to paint again, and the small size ensured that being more haphazard about it didn’t feel bad.

4: Summer cottage

I spent a couple days at our summer cottage. It was neat! Photo not mine.

5: New Baba tactics game work

I hadn’t worked on this for a while, so it was nice to get some new work done on it.

I posted about this boardgame in 2020 after building the board and pieces; it’s an asymmetric abstract boardgame based on the imaginary game Thud from Terry Pratchett‘s book of the same name. My initial goal was to reconstruct the game described in the book to the best of my ability; I had read about some of the other similar attempts some years earlier, but as far as I know I didn’t really utilize that knowledge in my own design. For example, the initial layout of the units was something that I stumbled into when considering Pratchett’s vague description of the starting position.

Anyway, this first version showed a surprising amount of promise, and I playtested it a bunch in late 2020, polishing the ruleset. Despite being quite happy with what I had then (and having built the above physical board and pieces from 2 cheap chess sets, acrylic paints, coins and pieces of old sock), the worry that the game balance was off in some hard-to-see way gnawed at me and I left the game to wait for later. There were a couple playtests every now and then over the years, but nothing substantial after that initial excitement. One cool detail is that I got a chance to briefly show the game to Vlaada Chvatil when he was visiting the Finnish event Ropecon last year. Thanks for taking a look, Vlaada!

As one might have noticed, this year has been quite active for me boardgame design -wise, and it seemed like a good idea to finally finish my Thud-like. I had already pondered on taking the game away from its origins, because I felt that it was enough of a separate thing that presenting it as a “fangame” would’ve felt a bit unpleasant. I did some more playtesting (thanks to quantumpotato for suggestions and playtesting help) and adjusted the rules quite a bit based on this – the 13×13 board became 11×11, one faction lost a fairly powerful move that seemed to be either overpowered or too weak, and the central Monolith piece became movable. I also changed the names of the components and the game to represent divergence from its origin, and thus Piiri was born.

I’m a bit wistful about the original 13×13 version of the game, so it might be that I’ll return to it at some point to give it another try. However, this 11×11 version seems to work ok, and as such it makes sense that this is the “official release”.

Download the game on itch.io!

I made an extremely juvenile 6-page comic called Wasserkloset Destiny:Ultra! You can read it here: https://www.hempuli.com/comic/?title=comics&id=7

My birthday was a couple days ago and a friend made me a cool birthday Baba card! It’s cool!

I’ve also updated the Paper Puzzle collection with the Equal measures puzzles, as well as a new Diagaquarium puzzle. You can see that below alongside another new Equal measures puzzle.

I posted some drawings I doodled as a part of a Stars Without Number campaign my friend is running earlier this year; I’ve since drawn more of them, as well as painted a couple other small pieces, so have at you:

Would you look at that: another abstract 2-player game! Like with paper puzzles, it seems that once I get into the mood, it tends to last for multiple things before I run out of steam.

Malsymmetric is probably the messiest of the three I’ve put on Itch.io (and also messier than the 4×4 one I haven’t posted on Itch but posted pics of earlier). I hope this won’t be too much of a problem, because the playtime appears to also be rather short. I playtested this (and the others) on playingcards.io, which I can recommend for simple boardgame designs, but I’ve (again) gotten the hankering of implementing a personal BGA-style rules-enforced boardgame engine, both for ease of testing and fun.

You can check out the rules and more images on Itch.io!

I worked a bunch more on this boardgame idea, and thanks to some good suggestions from pinchazumos & quantumpotato got it into a way better shape! Thank you! Anyway, the game felt like it was ready to be published to the rest of the world so like with Cylinders of the Wise, I put the rules on Itch.

Check them out here!

One change was that the board size increased from 5×5 to 6×6, which meant that I had to craft a new board for the physical build. Pretty happy with the result – the hinges are way nicer although the board doesn’t sit quite evenly when open.

Welp, ended up prototyping yet another boardgame. I think it needs more work but we’ll see how much once I get to actually playtesting it.

Also ESA2 has been progressing at a steady, if slow pace. Some pics: