Hempuli's blog

Ooh, a new paper puzzle type to close off the year! Yay!

Puzzles:

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 decided on a mostly-whim to export this tiny 2008 escape room game to HTML5, since it seemed fairly trivial and since despite the game’s simplicity I have some fondness for it. Anyway, I did end up having to do some additional work to get the thing rendering at double resolution, but whatever. The game’s likely to take less than 10 minutes to finish.

PLAY ON ITCH.IO

In other news, all but one of the Limited Alike puzzles in my WPC post below were outdated, broken versions; I’ve now updated them all, as well as added a Celltinels puzzle I had missed into the post.

Last year I was given the opportunity to make some paper puzzles for the World Puzzle Championship, held in Poland. It was suggested that out of the genres I’ve come up with, Celltinels and Limited Alike might be the best suited for the job, so I ended up making 4 puzzles of varying difficulties for both genres (and an extra Celltinels puzzle for reasons I’m slightly hazy about – I think it was an alternative version of the 3rd puzzle in the set in case the first one was too hard or too easy?) This was really cool and I’m happy I was asked to make them! Thanks! I also do hope that my kinda happy-go-lucky approach to puzzle design didn’t cause too much stress…

There was a one-year embargo on releasing the puzzles outside the event, and that has now passed so after seeing the fellow puzzle designer Menderbug release theirs, I thought I’d go ahead and do the same.

First, here are the rules for both genres as reminders:

Note! The clue numbers block the “vision” of other clues!

And here are the puzzles:

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.