Archive for the ‘Art’ Category.
I’ve been participating in a Stars Without Number TTRPG campaign led by a friend, and doodling about the various things we’ve seen throughout it. I thought I had posted some earlier doodles here but I guess not. Anyway, here’s some art!
Welp, that was quite a bit of stuff. Oh well.
Welp, it’s only 4 days into the new year but here I go again! I started working on this around ~Summer last year, but as my year-in-review post indicated, I wasn’t feeling entirely well then and left the idea on a very rough state. Even in my reinvigorated state, working on the engine didn’t feel entirely enjoyable, in part because of how custom-made everything needed to be. Anyway, I slapped things together to an acceptable state and now it’s finished!
Ok! I’ve been promising a general “what’s going on” post for a while now, and I guess it’s time to write exactly that. When this year started, I had a couple specific plans for how I’d handle my game development throughout the year (and in some cases onwards from there):
So how did all this turn out? Not very well. The structured schedule and the monthly game system both fell apart already in January. I couldn’t get myself to stay awake long enough if I woke up early, and preferred going to sleep when I felt tired, sleeping through the day and then being awake overnight. The first monthly game I had planned, a refined version of my earlier Ludum Dare #47 entry Keke’s Underwater Adventure, turned out to be way too large in scope (and most of the other ideas I had picked for monthly projects had the same issue, I suspect) and while I did get some stuff implemented, by the end of the month things were way too unfinished to call the result a success.
So yeah, not great. I don’t remember the exact order of events at this point, but I think I decided pretty quickly to try to make 12 small games over the year in total instead of trying to make one game every month. As for the weekly schedule, it seemed that since the issue was mostly feeling tired (and a decade of getting used to being a night owl), I was better off trying to live with it for the time being, especially because on top of tiredness I was noticing a slightly concerning lack of energy to make things. I did eat more than a half of a Carolina Reaper chili, though!
I had a plan for an April’s Fools game (two, in fact!) but the aforementioned lack of energy posed a fairly serious obstacle because I couldn’t muster the will to make either game happen on time. Luckily later in April I participated in Nordic Game Jam, which allowed me to actually finish a project, RUDE CHESS. I guess this triggered further productivity, because over the weeks following RUDE CHESS I managed to also finish It’s A Me, Baba Is You XTREME (one of the two April’s Fools games), Baba Friend and Keke in the Caves of Peril. Yay!
Before NGJ I started having constant restless leg syndrome, which further caused trouble with sleeping and keeping my daily rhythm straight. I often had to tire myself to get any sleep at all, and after the above burst of productivity, over the Summer I fell into a serious lull in motivation, resulting in me stopping bi-weekly gamedev streams and not really feeling like working on games at all for ~3 months. Ugh!!! I did manage to do some paper puzzle design and comics drawing in the meantime, but something was seriously not right.
October drawing close, I was contacted about a plan to make a small bundle of Halloween-themed games. This seemed like a potentially good way to get back on track gamedev-wise and I agreed, deciding on a whim on my game idea (or maybe it was more than a whim, I can’t remember. I think I had come up with the idea slightly before and decided to use it because it seemed funny?) Around this time I also had some blood tests taken and it turned out that I had a serious iron deficiency both in terms of hemoglobin and body iron reserves. And would you believe it, this turned out to have been the issue all along: getting some extra iron gave me motivation & energy back, and the restless leg syndrome went away, too! What’s funnier, a friend had recommended having my iron levels checked just before this (advice which I didn’t heed). Lesson of this story is: don’t get iron deficiency.
With the iron issue sorted out, I managed to finish The Plumber Thing, and this then led into a bunch of unrelated small games: Mamono Mower, Cavern Sweeper, Babataire, Babataire EX, a rerelease of Cavern of Flight, a rerelease & update of Once in Space, a holiday update to The Plumber Thing, some paper puzzles and finally It’s A Block-Pushing Game, fulfilling the goal of the year (or not, depending if the rereleases count). Overall I’m really happy with this year’s productivity, which is a bit surprising considering the iron deficiency. I also recorded a playthrough of a game I liked as a child, Lost Valley.
There are a couple things that were left somewhat or entirely unfulfilled over the year:
And now, what’s planned for the next year?
Here’s a list of the games released this year, alongside the source of inspiration for them (if I can remember it):
Maybe that’s enough of that?
Hey! I’m releasing a whole bunch of things again, would you look at that. I played the Zachtronics Solitaire Collection earlier, and had a good time with it, which of course led me to ponder about making my own solitaire game. I considered a couple different concepts, but ultimately settled on a design that resembles the Cluj solitaire from the aforementioned collection. Drawing my own deck of cards was fun, but don’t be fooled; the solitaire doesn’t really have anything to do with Baba, despite the cards & the name. I’m pretty happy with the result, although I couldn’t be bothered with implementing a system to ensure that all the deals are solvable.
Hi! I finally drew a comic in English again. I’ve been drawing Finnish comics for the student magazine 4 times a year for years but been wanting to do comics stuff for online audiences as well. I’m not sure how common these will be, but hopefully I’ll manage to hit some kind of a structure in comicsing.
I’ll be accumulating random comics here: https://hempuli.com/comic/comics.php
I made a tiny update to the main website page. It’s been accumulating games for a long time now I’ve been having some trouble actually fitting all of them on there, so I’ve now divided the games into three (admittedly really vague) categories. Now there’s space for more again!
Yes, that – good luck in 2021. Since paper puzzles have been the “thing” for me this year, I’ll end it with one more: Ilotulite (Finnish for “firework”)! This is the second attempt at the idea; the first one was more of a joke and not very good.
(Click for big!)
Here are some puzzles:
I’ve also been working on a small tool for making paper puzzles; it’s very debug-like, but might offer some use for people who want to make these kinds of things: http://www.hempuli.com/puzzlemaker.zip
Anyway, let’s hope things get better for the world next year! I’ve tried to do my part; Baba Is You’s success has allowed me to donate over USD $300,000 to charities over the past 2 years. Yay! Thanks for the support!
Finally, here’s a painting I made to celebrate New Year’s Eve:
Ok! The online level-sharing is out in public beta!
As mentioned earlier, I wanted to test a method to let people outside of Steam to also be able to check out the open beta. And now there’s a way to do exactly that! Just head to itch.io and pick up the limited-time editor build; it will only be kept up-to-date until the editor releases and has some limited utilities, but it’ll let you experience the full extent of the level-sharing beta! I understand that is still not quite comparable to being able to test the editor on a Switch, but as I said earlier, that is not entirely something I could make happen. I hope people will find this method acceptable. Thanks for your support!
You can also read the Steam announcement here.
One more thing: I set up a Twitter account for gathering level codes of levels that people found cool or interesting. Do tweet at @BabaLevels if you feel you’ve found such a level! This’ll make picking the featured levels easier in the future as well.
Things have taken longer than intended, as they tend to do, but we’re almost there! In fact enough there to start publicly testing the beta! Specifically, the “open beta” bit concerns the online level-sharing feature, that has so far been off-limits outside of the closed testing group.
Since this is the first time we’re setting up something like this and we want to get an idea of how much there is to worry about and what kind of troubles and such we’ll need to prepare for, the level-sharing is quite rudimentary initially. The way it’ll work for now is:
The main way to access these features is via the Steam beta branch system; a lot of Steam players have been able to check out the progress of the editor over the past months already, albeit without the level-sharing.
Now then, I’ve felt very bad about the fact that people not on Steam haven’t been able to access the beta; it’s especially unfortunate for Nintendo Switch™ users, since they’ve had to wait the longest for updates in general. Due to this, here’s how I plan to go forward:
Finally, thanks to all of you for your amazing support and kindness towards the project over the years! I really want to offer all of you some neat extra content and hope that the editor works and is fun to use. I also think that Baba & friends will appear in some future games, although nothing is set in stone regarding that.
I made another comic and cover art illustration for my student organization’s magazine. Pretty happy with the result, although I was way behind schedule. Sorry about that. :(
You can also see this on DeviantArt.