I streamed today, after a week or so of not getting much done game development-wise. Phew! Baba got some work done on the editor; it’s coming together and even though there’s still lots to do, I realized that I’m possibly closer to being done than I previously thought. That’s encouraging!
On ESA 2’s side, I worked further on making the level editor work in a zoomed-in mode, to make dealing with small tiles nicer. I also shrunk the in-game font and HUD elements to have them not fill the game window as much. All in all, small things but progress nonetheless!
Welcome to the new year! I have some hopefully exciting plans regarding this year; I’ll announce those as they become relevant. For now, work on Baba’s editor has continued at a slowish pace and that’s pretty much it. I’ve added line, rectangle & flood fill tools, implemented some very important underlying systems and in general tried to finally get onwards from the object list system; it affects the codebase very heavily so implementing it neatly is very important, but it’s hard to have the patience to actually go through with that neatness.
Baba was nominated in a bunch of awards at the end of last year, including The Game Awards & Golden Joystick awards. Disco Elysium and Outer Wilds took the prizes, but I don’t mind too much because both seem to be really unique and amazing games. (I wouldn’t entirely mind some awards, though.)
Oh no, has it seriously been 7 months without Switch updates? That’s terrifying, and I apologize for things taking this long. Oh well – we’re now here so might as well list what has happened over that time:
Fixed a small ending-related visual bug if the grid is enabled
Fixed a rather severe oversight where certain rules were adding events to the undo buffer in the wrong order, causing errors
Added an additional check for situations where the player would’ve cleared an area but due to e.g. level repositioning between versions didn’t get the flower for it
Fixed a bug where floating Baba and a weak Wall would have a mystery interaction
In certain cases where the game would freeze, it displays a special effect instead (this’ll be expanded on and it might not appear in the game at the moment)
Large underlying code reworking related to conditionals, not relevant in the game right now but it’s work for the future
Related to the above, conditionals with parameters behave in an equivalent way whether the condition has a Not or not
Fixed the word Facing not accepting directional words
Related to above, made Empty Is work mostly as intended
Fixed “Empty Is X” particle effects appearing everywhere even if Empty had a conditional word
Added guest credits to “Across”. Apologies to Corey Martin for missing that when adding the level.
New option in the settings menu! You can now disable screenshake.
There’s a new secret thing in the game!
A certain map now has a clear counter like other maps, so you can actually fully finish it. This should retroactively activate if you’ve already cleared the map.
Changed the way the level selector works. This shouldn’t affect the playing experience apart from one level adjustment listed below. If you note new bugs with the level selector, I’m very interested in knowing about them.
If you’d try to enter two levels at once, the game now opens a menu to pick from.
Added a visual indicator for movement that “fails” (i.e. ends up not moving the object). So if Baba moves against a Shifting object, you’ll now get a small visual indicator that some movement happened.
Fixed a buggy cutscene.
You can now use “Return to map” in a new spot.
Fixed a slightly annoying error with how the map cursor is positioned in certain rare situations
Fixed a level selection -related bug
Fixed a particular Win-condition not working
Fixed a rare conditional statement not working
Fixed a case of the player not being able to enter a level despite having the map cursor on them
Fixed a case of the game trying to enter an erroneous level in certain circumstances
Fixed a case of the game ignoring a level if it thought you were trying to enter two levels at once
Fixed the game storing sub-second frame timing data improperly; not very important but I guess the game tracks your playtime more accurately now
Fixed a graphical glitch in an ending-related thing
Fixed a case where the borders of the levels were considered Empty
Fixed a rare bug relating to an endgame conditional word
Languages! The game now supports 13 languages, with more coming later. Note that the translations only affect the UI and menus; the graphics are English-only. We tried hard to look into localizing it all but it would’ve been too massive of an undertaking. (Please report any issues with the translations, be it on Steam or in-game!)
You can now see the version ID in the bottom-left corner of the main menu! Relatedly, I moved away from the two-letter version naming scheme because it could’ve been confusing.
The game will get an official level editor in 2020! I’ll make a flashier announcement about that in a bit. Anyway, there have been some underlying changes in preparation for that.
Levels adjusted/changed
Whoops
Collaborative effort
Acrobatics
Tectonic Movements
Seeking Acceptance
Heavy Cloud (this might actually be a large change)
Keke And The Star
The Heist
Gallery
Backstage
Maritime Adventures
Elusive condition
Floodgates (used to have tons of rules, adjusted the level to have the same idea with less fixed rules)
A Way Out?
Another Way
???
Meteor Strike
Triplets (a large unintended solution)
Rocky Road (changed Foliage to Rocks to keep the name sensible)
Hidden Path
Out At Sea (added water that I had removed during development for the name to make some sense)
Tunnel (the level didn’t utilize the intended mechanic)
People who have followed my increasingly-infrequent streams already knew this, I guess, but it’s now official – Baba Is You will get this cool, official (and hopefully polished-ish) level editor next year! What’s even neater is that it’ll support sharing your levels with other players over the internet!! Exact details of what that means will come later, though.
Relatedly, I streamed both yesterday and today after a long(?) break, adding stuff to the editor. Today’s big thing was the ability to remove objects from your “object palette”; it feels like removing entries from a list/database is always somewhat more precarious than adding them (although, now that I think of it, in this specific case the adding was also quite precarious because it had to be implemented on top of Baba’s existing editor structures without breaking them.) Anyway, the deletion system seemed to work very neatly almost from the get-go, so that’s excellent.
Future streams (which’ll probably be still quite erratic; I moved recently and the rest of the year (and the beginning of next year) is looking way too busy) will probably be largely about these same topics; it’d be cool to get the editor out next spring, but I’m not holding my breath (I think.)
The past couple streams have concentrated on Baba’s level editor’s object selector. Making a robust system that doesn’t break down but allows stuff like searching & tags has been relatively fun but also a *lot* of work. It’s kind of funny to think that once this bit of the editor works, it might turn out to be the single largest hurdle to overcome. Possibly not, but I like the idea.
On top of Baba, some work was recently done on fixing the (final?) outstanding issues in Stumblehill. It’d be neat to add a bit more content to that game, but it’s probably for the best if I don’t add another tentative thing onto the already-overflowing to-do -list.
Streamed some Baba development and a *little* bit of ESA2. Baba work included a small step forward with the official editor, implementing the Turn-word seen above, investigating a mystery cornercase bug and redesigning a level I didn’t like (not sure if it’s better now, though.) I intended to do more ESA2 stuff, but work there ended up being mostly small editor features and replaying the old version a bunch.
Got a small stream done tonight! There’s still a little bit of translation work to be done, but things are looking pretty nice on that front. It sure has taken some time, though, thanks to my bumbling. Today I fixed various tiny issues with certain translation-related code and tried to redesign a level I dislike, unsuccessfully. Oh well!!
Today’s stream saw me finally draw the cyrillic alphabet for Baba Is You! The game won’t be fully localized but we’re doing translations of the UI for a bunch of languages and it’s neat to get forward with that. I’m quite happy with how the symbols look in the game’s doodly font.
I also had time to work a bit on ESA 2; I fixed some bugs and started adding some needed features for the game’s level editor. It’d be neat to finally get to the point where I can start building some rooms, though!
More streaming! Today’s streaming was mostly just fixing a couple bugs in Baba, then implementing some final bits of translation code and starting some complicated level editor code. Slow-going but pretty neat.
I also demonstrated ESA 2’s original version on-stream and started feeling really bad about restarting the project; there were lots of neat things in the original! Bummer about all the clunky stuff, hmph.
