Archive for the ‘ESA 2’ Category.
Today I worked on a new level editor for the new take on ESA 2. Things went pretty swimmingly, and in 3-and-some hours I managed to implement basic tile placement & room creating, saving and loading. Next up will be layers, quality-of-life stuff for tile placement and object placement. I can’t say I’d be massively hyped about doing all this again, but it’s a promising start. Let’s hope the development keeps going at a good pace!
Ok! After a couple months of almost total silence, I’m trying to get back to weekly updates & streams. Today I worked on Baba’s map art, seen above in its WIP state, as well as restructuring it to make more sense. I kind of dreaded streaming beforehand but it was good fun once I got going. I’ll be trying to stream ESA 2 a bit more in upcoming streams because I’ll need to work on Baba outside of streams as well.
In other news:
– I won the Excellence in Design & Best Student Game awards at IGF! I’m aware that this update is over 2 months after the fact, but looks like I didn’t post about it.
– Stumblehill, the penguin game, is pretty much done! It was quite exhausting to concentrate solely on it so I’m happy that I can soon leave it behind.
– I’ll be going to No More Sweden, the oddly-named game jam, in July!
Let’s see if I can get this to work, now!
A lot has happened over the past couple months regarding my game development endeavours but I’ve been too distracted/tired to write about them here. I’ll try to get something written sometime soon! It’d be sweet to get the weekly updates going; I wouldn’t want to see this blog go silent.
Alright! Obviously the announcement of Baba was the BIG THING today, but as it turns out I also had the opportunity to stream a bit. Working out how I want the map system to work & accounting for various oddities the users might end up doing with the level editor is fairly tedious but I think I got a good chunk of that handled today. Getting this whole part of Baba’s development behind me is going to be great, although I’m already feeling that the current system is too hacky/rigid so some refactoring might need to take place between now and the game’s eventual release. Eugh. Still, progress!!
People were wondering when I’d return to ESA 2, and while I’m pretty happy to be able to say that it’s officially on a hiatus (mainly in order to avoid extra stress from having to worry about keeping it worked on while concentrating so heavily on Baba) I want not to disappoint those who originally got interested in my works via ESA. So I think I’ll stream some ESA2 dev sometime soon, even if the actual hiatus won’t end until next March or so. Sorry. At least people have seemed understanding, which is very kind & nice.
I actually managed to work on both Baba and ESA2 on today’s stream. In Baba, I implemented some map-related things to make it more polished. I also started working on a fairly cool special effect but ended up giving up on that because it would’ve required me to rework some very base-level code and would also have caused some entirely new graphical issues to solve.
In ESA 2, I implemented the intro for a new (old) boss. Said boss still needs a bunch of graphical work but I have the general idea of the fight in my head so getting to implementing the actual fight should be fairly smooth.
I also dabbled a bit with my chess pathfinder and fixed a bug in how bishops behave if they’re looking for a path to a square that they can’t actually land on.
I’m currently in a state of mind where I have a whole bunch of projects I’d like to dabble with but kinda know that I wouldn’t have the motivation to actually work on them. I think I’ll do a little classic roguelike project at some point but maybe it’d be for the best not to do even that.
EDIT: Oh yeah, I think I skipped a stream & a weekly update due to Ludum Dare last week! I’ll keep that in mind. I’ll make a post about the Dare when I remember and have the energy.
Here’s finally that one weekly update I missed some time ago! I wasn’t feeling very inspired and ended up working mostly on Baba after all. The stream was pretty slow but I did fix some bugs, cleared up a very curious unintuitive mechanic (thanks Mokesmoe!) and added a new level. The word I added last time has turned out to be a pretty tough one to create levels for, but it’s interesting enough that I think it can stay. I have plans for a really odd and cool word to add, but that’ll require a bunch of work and despite my plans saying otherwise I didn’t get started on that today. Oh, and I added those brick tiles seen above!
In ESA 2, I made some sprites for a new boss, so that’s nice! It’d be interesting to have fun designing a boss again. :)
Today’s stream concentrated on Baba Is You, as has been the case for the past months, but ESA 2 also saw some work. In ESA 2 I added a new level and some new tiles to go with that and an important visual element that’ll be used in a bunch of cutscenes. The room added is the last room before a boss, so that’s sweet. In Baba I finished a room I had started before and added 4 (I think?) new levels, although 3 of those were replacements for removed ones. I edited a certain word mechanic pretty heavily (which necessitated the aforementioned replacement), and while I lost what I think to be a pretty funny mechanic, I got a fairly similar substitute in its place and some new potential puzzle elements. There was some nice chatting going on, and I think Alvaro_as was the one who suggested making a poem in Baba; it’s a wonderful idea! Now I need to figure out how Red and Blue work, though.
A new word was added to Baba, and it turned out to allow for some pretty interesting levels; as the title says, I managed to create 4 new ones using this new word, which is really nice! Another new word was on the to-do-list, but I realized that I’ll have to ponder on how to implement it properly because some potentially problematic cornercases turned up. Some new decorative objects (and their respective words, of course) were also added; the plan is to differentiate the game’s map into various visually and mechanically (or difficulty-ally) distinct areas.
I had started a new room in ESA 2 but left it unfinished, so the stream ended with me finishing work on that room and some related story flag things. I’m very very close to the end of the final area, here, although the amount of things I’m not happy with is so long that I’m not sure if this is something to feel good about just yet!
The chat was very lively and encouraging today, thank you a lot! :)
Unlike I had planned beforehand, today’s stream concentrated on, well, Baba Is You. I redid a couple levels and fixed some bugs. I think I have a good amount of levels now, but more might be coming & the existing ones need enormous amounts of work.
After this I returned to ESA 2 which I’ve really been neglecting for the past couple months; A new enemy was added (as seen above, although it’s still fairly WIP) and I added decorative stalactities/stalagmites with the new prop system. I also adjusted the behaviour of an older enemy to be more predictable. All in all small changes, but nonetheless something.
I’m one stream behind schedule at the moment, so there’ll be an extra stream someday, but it’s hard to say when exactly. We’ll see!
Today’s stream concentrated once again mostly on Baba Is You; a new word was added along with 3 new levels using said word, some colours were changed and I added more proper names for some levels. I ended up not naming all the levels on-stream since that would have spoiled them to some extent (although I’m not sure if anyone’s interested enough to check them out in more detail). I also added a new tutorial level + restructured the level map slightly.
In ESA 2 I added a little shortcut and a cutscene to go with it – there’s a lot of polish I’ve been thinking of, but I haven’t quite reached the level of motivation needed to pull off most of that. Nevertheless, this little addition was still better than nothing!!!
Baba Is You will probably need another art pass before being finished, but there’s only a little bit of stuff to add before I’m happy enough with it to let some testers have a go at the game. It’d be nice to be able to enter a stage where I’m not adding more content but polishing the existing stuff & adding quality-of-life things such as menus and whatnot sometime soon.