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!

Hey look! I didn’t miss the timing!

Anyway, big news first: Mobile Suit Baba is out! Really glad it didn’t take a year, but it got close. I want to add a bit more in terms of modding support and such, but after that it’ll be time to return to Planet Keke.

You can find the game here!

I also finished Flatdog Scuffle, another 2-player abstract boardgame! The rulebook will need some clarifications and illustrations, but the game seems to work pretty nicely.

See the rules here!

Sectovember! Gotta love that month!!

To be honest, not too much has happened over the past three months. Mobile Suit Baba trudges ever onwards, Planet Keke has been on hold to give more time for the former, blah blah. The most significant change over here has been Vilma’s introducton to the ecosystem. This has gone mostly fine, I’d say.

I ran playtests of two more-than-2-player boardgames; one is a more eurogamey deal, while the other is a roll-and-write. Unsurprisingly the eurogame design didn’t work very well on the first playtest, while the RnW showed more promise. I’ve been excited abour Ledergames‘ Root again, and pondered about something inspired by it and My City.

I removed Elder Dance from Itch.io since it turned out that the design had some very glaring issues. I have an idea for how to address them now, but said ideas need more testing.

ESA 2 has also progressed at a ponderous but nonetheless existent pace. I’ll need to refactor the moving platform code sometime soon, and this prospect isn’t one I look forward to.

I decided to finally record a playthrough of the old 2006 demo of Spud’s Quest by Chris Davis. It’s a klik-based game that’s close to my heart and virtually impossible to find online anymore, and as such showcasing it to a larger crowd seemed like a fun idea. I’ll do a playthrough of the full game as well at some point.

Watch the Spud’s Quest demo playthrough here!

Finished yet another abstract boardgame! This one is especially abstract, but seemed quite fun during playtesting. Not sure about the name, though…

Download the rules on itch.io!

Would you look at that, it’s another abstract 2-player boardgame! This one has been cooking for a while, and I’m still not 100% sure if the design works, but the playtests I did have (thanks quantumpotato) were promising.

Check it out on Itch.io!

(I really need to set up a boardgames section on the main website…)

I really need to do these at the end of the month instead of during the next month, I have a lot of stuff from September I’d want to write about!!

Anyway – last month was mostly fairly uneventful. My game projects progressed, the solitaire collection got another new solitaire (not released yet), Planet Keke got its name and moved along at a slow-but-steady pace, same for Mobile Suit Baba & ESA2.

I’ve had a bunch of trouble lately concentrating on my game projects when not streaming. With this in mind the weekly streams have been excellent, but it has meant that I’ve only done work on my projects a couple hours every week, and that doesn’t quite cut it due to how slow everything progresses at the moment. I’ll need to figure out something there…

My favourite procrastination from videogame dev has become… boardgame dev! I designed about 3-ish new boardgames last month, one of which can be seen above. The design processes might spill a bit over to September, hard to remember. Anyway, I have 3 boardgames that I think are almost ready, but that need a final(?) looking-at, as well as writing out the final rules, before I’m happy putting them available. I removed Malsymmetric from my Itch.io listing because after some thought that one didn’t really feel solid enough. Maybe I should take another look at it…

What else… right, I set up the Mailchimp newsletter thing, and sent the first newsletter at the end of last month! That was exciting! I doubt I’ll have enough content for regular monthly messages, but maybe that’s a positive for most of the people receiving them; makes sense to only send out stuff when there’s something to actually say.

And finally: I graduated! For real this time! I’m now a Master of Psychology, and I also applied for and received official sanctioning so now I’m also a real, proper Psychologist. Nice! I’m planning to join some student events this autumn to get a final taste of university life as a way of saying farewell to that part of my life. I’ll also be drawing a final(?) comic & cover art piece to our student magazine.

I guess that’s it, mostly? As said, it’s hard to remember anymore exactly what took place in August and what’s already September material. Not that any of this really matters, haha.

I had 2 small ideas for abstract boardgames, and ended up developing them in tandem, kind of. They’re very simplistic but interesting, and as usual it was really fun to make the components. Click on the images above to download them on Itch!

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!

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!