Archive for the ‘Small games’ Category.
Ok! I’ve been working on a “holiday update” of sorts for The Plumber Thing, mainly because I felt that the game could’ve done with a little bit more content & polish. That’s done now, released just yesterday together with a 50% discount on Itch.
The update mainly adds a new area, a new powerup, new puzzles and some extra details and polish. If you liked the original game, this is probably up your alley.
Another HTML5 solitaire, Babataire EX! This one is way less refined and more chaotic than the previous one, but this one actually features rule-changing elements like Baba Is You! I’m reasonably happy with the result, but I think I’ll adjust the design a bit in the coming days.
In other news, I’ve scoured my archives but couldn’t find any source files for the original Once in Space from 2007! That’s really odd because I’ve tended to care about archiving stuff a lot, even too much, and I would’ve expected that I’d for sure have saved some project file or another. I wonder what happened there.
Anyway, I noticed that if the existing executable is launched with the -NOF command, the game-breaking fullscreen resolution-switching goes away and the game’s current build is actually playable! I set up a zip with a .bat file to get this effect, and included also an earlier build that for some reason exists; someone told me they’d be interested in playing the original. Warning: it’s extremely finicky!
I’ve added the three recent new games (Babataire, Cavern Sweeper & Mamono Mower) to the main website. Due to them being very quickly-made and in-browser-only, I initially added them to the “small games” page, but after some consideration moved them to the “medium games” page, because my “medium games” page is more a “games not made for game jams or other such events” page.
Twitter’s future looks even more uncertain now, so I guess I might be posting about future endeavours in here & in my Mastodon & Cohost accounts more than before soon. Oh well!
I made another minesweeper-like game! I was interested in seeing what happens if the mines in minesweeper affect tiles around them other than the default 8, and that led me down the path of making this game. It was a fun exercise, although the solving logic got quite impossible very easily when combining multiple different patterns. The game’s HTML5 so you can play it in your browser, same as Mamono Mower & Babataire.
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.
Once in Space! That’s the game that originally prompted me to set up the hempuli.com website! I remember Nifflas helpfully making me a simple HTML example for how I could format the page for the game, and I’ve been using that as a template ever since (with some adjustments over the years). That was a hugely helpful HTML file!
Anyway, Once in Space was one of my original “platformers-with-a-twist”, alongside games like Timerocketxby, Flickerstrings & GENERIC Platformer. I was quite fond of it, although the initial 2007 version received some harsh-but-valid criticism from a JayIsGames.com reviewer due to how rough the game was to play.
Eventually, in 2011 (I thought it was earlier), I decided to remake the game. For various reasons that version was ultimately kind of lost in time and space, despite being much much more refined game design -wise than the 2007 original. I’ve been thinking of updating it for a new release for years, but now that has actually happened!
In other news, I put Cavern of Flight, one of my highest-quality Ludum Dare entries on Itch.io earlier this year; the game had had a very unfortunate visual bug ever since release where respawning after dying would commonly require you to hard-restart the program. I fixed that for the Itch.io release, but there were a couple additional issues with its design that I didn’t bother fixing at the time. However, while I was still excited about putting OiS 2022 out, I went and actully fixed those issues, making the game a much less rough experience to finish. So that’s two old games now available, better than ever!
Exuno & Goost from the Mystery Fun House blind speedrunning community inspired me to make a lawnmowing-based game. After some jokey lawnmowing crossover suggestions, I started feeling that I wanted to actually make one of them real, and proceeded to spend the rest of the night programming a simple HTML5 lawnmowing-minesweeper hybrid. And this is it! Based on Mamono Sweeper, which you should definitely check out!
This was also a very useful learning experience with various quirks of Clickteam Fusion 2.5’s HTML5 exporting feature.
I made a small puzzle metroidvania as a part of the Click-or-Treat Halloween bundle this month! It was fun to make a silly side thing, although I did end up crunching a bit to get it done in time.
You can find the bundle here ($9): https://itch.io/b/1601/click-or-treat-2022
The game itself is here ($2, Windows only): https://hempuli.itch.io/the-plumber-thing
There have been some other new things I should make a blog post about! I’ll try to get that done eventually!!! Anyway, happy Halloween and whatnot.
Hey! Another new game only a week after the last! Now to be fair, this one I made originally a year ago for Ludum Dare 48. However, I’ve since added polish, undo, new levels, music and so on, so this new release is quite a bit neater than the original. Unfortunately only Windows is supported, though.
Heyy, after a long while I’ve actually finished a small game! My dreams of releasing a small game every month this year have shattered already but at least there’s this (and should be some more before the year ends).
I was at Nordic Game Jam last weekend; it was great to be at an event like this for the first time in 3 years, and due to recent mistakes with game jams (don’t try making menu-heavy games at game jams) I was kind of hankering to make something small. I had this funky puzzle idea in my head, and thought it vaguely fit the themes I drew (“Schadenfreude” and “Matching”), so decided to go with this concept instead of thinking up something new. It’s nice to get some of these ideas out without too much effort.
I’ve now polished the game a bit; it offers 14 levels of somewhat mysterious puzzling fun.