Hempuli's blog

(Cool photo & cool cake by my girlfriend, Anni :3)

Nordic Game Jam 2017 was last weekend, and I ended up winning it with my game, Baba Is You!

I went in not really expecting much; I wasn’t initially really in the mood for making new games so the plan was to kinda feel the situation and possibly just work on ESA 2 and/or Snake Game. The theme of the jam was “Not There”, and at some point it got me thinking about “not” as an operator in programming/logic. This in turn made me think of a puzzle game where the game logic is part of the game world, and eventually this idea turned into my entry. I was expecting to run to some really hairy coding problems and not be able to finish, but hey, that very much didn’t happen!

I’m not totally sure where to take the game from here; during the event my plan was to polish it a bit and release it mostly as-is, but since people really liked it and it even raised some philosophical considerations in some players, I think I’ll be working on it further.

Download the game on itch.io!

In other news, Environmental Station Alpha’s second anniversary was also last weekend, and I almost completely forgot to announce the sale that went with that. Oh well! Let’s hope we won’t get to its 3rd anniversary before ESA 2 is done.

Next up in the indie gamedev event schedule will be No More Sweden in June; we’ll see what happens there :O

Nordic Game Jam starts tomorrow! I really want to be able to show bits of ESA 2 and Snake Game there, so I spent today’s stream polishing some tiny bits of both. Thursday will be mostly quiet so I hope that I’ll be able to pull off some more polish in preparation for the actual event.

In ESA 2 I finally updated the double jump effect as well as the hookshot’s graphical look. Not 100% sure about the latter because of how “lasery” it looks, it almost feels as if this new hookshot should be able to be used offensively. Nevertheless, it’s an improvement. I’ll try to add some polish to certain early-game areas as well so that I could show off the beginning of the game without feeling that it’s way too work-in-progress.

In Snake Game I worked a bit on a cutscene/hub area that’ll be used for accessing the various encounters in the game. I needed to implement a ladder for said area, and to be honest the code for it is fairly hacky, but hopefully that won’t become a problem later on. I’ll try to get this area polished further before NGJ so that the player can somewhat seamlessly move from the main menu to the first encounter while learning controls on the way.

Today’s stream was fairly short & uneventful; I added a new small room to ESA 2, fixed some bugs and started working on the transition to the next area. Surprisingly Snake Game saw more development; I implemented a system where the player can enter their name when starting a new game. The system ended up being really hacky which will probably cause trouble for me at some point, but at least it works.

If the player can name the main character of a game, should they be able to add stuff like exclamation marks, numbers or dots to the name, or should the game force the name to be somewhat standard?

Still didn’t get out of the current area in today’s stream, but there’s very little left to be done here (sans the bossfight, which I skipped and will implement later). I added a new room, worked on & polished one and finalized a couple others. I also added the basics of a Very Important Cutscene along with a fairly important (and hopefully cool) gameplay thing. Hopefully I can now get this area mostly done before next week’s stream!

Also finally managed to implement the player’s parachute in Snake Game! That’s another thing that has been coming for nearly a year, so it’s great to get forward on that front, too!

Today’s stream was fairly uneventful, but there was a surprisingly high amount of viewers, which was really nice. Thanks, people! :) I added 2 new rooms and implemented a new enemy, albeit one that works mostly as a way to teach the player a movement technique, seen above. I feel that I’ll have to add a couple larger enemies to this area because it’s meant to have a strong theme going on and right now that theme really isn’t there.

Also started the stream with working a bit on Snake Game’s spritework! I’ve finally redrawn the main character’s sprites to look more like what I had in mind; it took me over a year to get that done because I was so scared of the task. There’s still the walking/running animation left to do, but after that I can finally move onto other stuff (momentarily, but nevertheless).

Okay!! Now I’m back to date with these progress posts & streams! Today 2 new enemies and 2 new rooms were added (or more accurately, 1 new room was added and 1 half-finished room was implemented), and I got a game mechanic I had kinda dreaded to work on implemented. It’ll need extra work but I’m pretty sure the worst is behind us. Yay!

Also worked a bit on Snake Game; hopefully I can get back to that. Moving some old hand-made scripting stuff to lua at the moment, not too difficult but kind of a large task to do. Satisfying, though.

Ugh!! Got a headache which really slowed things down, and on top of that Twitch behaved strangely, leading to the stream cutting for some time. Still, I got a new room semi-done along with little tweaks here and there (such as updating what were previously laser beams to visually more interesting blue flares, as well as spriting some new plants). Also did some very very preliminary work on Snake Game after a long break. Hopefully next week will be more productive!

Today’s stream was spent on an entirely new area in ESA 2! I added 3 new rooms, 2 new enemies and a new environmental hazard. The new area feels somewhat static right now but hopefully some animated machinery and such can alleviate that. Moving platforms are proving to be problematic once again, and a feature related to them I was planning for today didn’t make it. I’ll have to look at that later.

No work done on Map Generator or Snake Game, although I’ve worked a lot on the former during the past week.

There they are! I added 3 new enemies to ESA 2 today along with tiny tweaks. Making them took more time than I estimated, but it was fun and I finally got around to implementing a ricocheting effect for enemies with shells.

Snake game got also some early work on the player losing while inside their plane. Making a nice-looking effect for that will be really time-consuming, I’m afraid! Also fixed various smaller bugs here and there.
No map generator work tonight.

Today’s ESA 2 progress was way slower than I’d have hoped, mainly due to a huge amount of tiny annoying glitches related to the new feature I’ve been working on. I tinkered with those and added some new content but ultimately gave up on trying to get everything working and instead decided to look at the glitches outside of the stream.

Snake game saw a return since I had figured out a way to fix a really horrible crashng bug in it! I spent most of the stream implementing features of the Snake Game engine in lua, but progress was fairly good and the attempted lua fix seems to do what it’s meant to, namely increase the FPS (although I had MMF’s debugger open while testing for a long time and interpreted the related slowdown as indicative of additional needed optimization). There were a couple weird and potentially annoying glitches left in the game after the conversion was done, but hopefully those can be ironed out.

Map generator saw the addition of lighthouses! That is all.