Hempuli's blog

I didn’t end up finishing anything on time for either Ludum Dare nor NGJ (not that I tried, either, for the latter) but I did start a little side project that feels promising, so I guess I’ll be tinkering with that a bunch for a bit. I’ll post more about it when it gets to a slightly more complete state.

However, unrelated to either jam, I made a tiny silly browser game called Neltris and put it on Itch on the Thursday-Friday night! It’s… silly but I quite like it.

You can play it here!

I’ve been failing to get the weekly streams going this year, first due to being sick, then due to Fondue arriving, then due to laziness, then due to moving and then due to Nordic Game Jam. I have some more stuff in the horizon that’ll affect my ability to stream, but outside of specific events preventing me from streaming I need to step up the game a bit, especially ESA2 really needs that.

I haven’t updated the blog in a bit, but this time there’s actually a reason for this! I’ve been intending to eventually migrate my blog away from WordPress, and have been setting up a homemade thing for viewing posts & then migrating old posts into the new system. I vaguely thought that after starting this process, the next blogpost would already be in the new system and as such didn’t log in here for a bit. But it’s been long enough (partially because I don’t entirely trust how good my PHP/PDO code is) without the new blog coming online, so let’s make a normal update here instead.

First of all, A Solitaire Mystery is now fully out! It boasts 23 solitaires at the moment, but we do have plans to add more at a later date. You can get it for USD $3 on Itch.io:

That’s my first proper Löve2D release, too! There are a lot of little odd spots in the codebase, but overall I think I’ve built a relatively nice basic system for future lua games. Thanks to Hazelstorm and knexator for the guest solitaires & to Hazelstorm for the excellent music!

In other news, the number of Covemountlikes has reached a whopping 16! All of them (plus RUDE CHESS and IT’S A BLOCK-PUSHING GAME) can be found in this collection!

Also, I’ll be moving to a new apartment soon! It’s exciting although I worry about the cats a bit, both in terms of logistics and especially Fondue getting used to the new place. We’ll see.

Ludum Dare 55 will be at the end of the week, and Nordic Game Jam a week after that. We’ll see what happens with those…

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!

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:

Don’t mind the silly name: it’s what I ended up with with the boardgame I posted about earlier. I got to playtest the game a bit and it seemed solid enough as it was, so I decided to call it done and put it on Itch.io. I also submitted it to Ludum Dare #53, which feels a bit silly in hindsight.

Check it out on Itch.io!

Ok! I’ve been promising a general “what’s going on” post for a while now, and I guess it’s time to write exactly that. When this year started, I had a couple specific plans for how I’d handle my game development throughout the year (and in some cases onwards from there):

• I intended to start a more structured weekly schedule, sleeping times included, in an effort to both differentiate my free and work time better and to get my terribly unstable daily rhythm under control.
• I planned to make a small game every month for a total of 12 small games, both as a way to try out this system I had first seen used by Petri Purho in… 2007, was it? and in order to take a mental break from Baba Is You and other large, multi-year projects that had been on my mind over the past years.

So how did all this turn out? Not very well. The structured schedule and the monthly game system both fell apart already in January. I couldn’t get myself to stay awake long enough if I woke up early, and preferred going to sleep when I felt tired, sleeping through the day and then being awake overnight. The first monthly game I had planned, a refined version of my earlier Ludum Dare #47 entry Keke’s Underwater Adventure, turned out to be way too large in scope (and most of the other ideas I had picked for monthly projects had the same issue, I suspect) and while I did get some stuff implemented, by the end of the month things were way too unfinished to call the result a success.

So yeah, not great. I don’t remember the exact order of events at this point, but I think I decided pretty quickly to try to make 12 small games over the year in total instead of trying to make one game every month. As for the weekly schedule, it seemed that since the issue was mostly feeling tired (and a decade of getting used to being a night owl), I was better off trying to live with it for the time being, especially because on top of tiredness I was noticing a slightly concerning lack of energy to make things. I did eat more than a half of a Carolina Reaper chili, though!

I had a plan for an April’s Fools game (two, in fact!) but the aforementioned lack of energy posed a fairly serious obstacle because I couldn’t muster the will to make either game happen on time. Luckily later in April I participated in Nordic Game Jam, which allowed me to actually finish a project, RUDE CHESS. I guess this triggered further productivity, because over the weeks following RUDE CHESS I managed to also finish It’s A Me, Baba Is You XTREME (one of the two April’s Fools games), Baba Friend and Keke in the Caves of Peril. Yay!

Before NGJ I started having constant restless leg syndrome, which further caused trouble with sleeping and keeping my daily rhythm straight. I often had to tire myself to get any sleep at all, and after the above burst of productivity, over the Summer I fell into a serious lull in motivation, resulting in me stopping bi-weekly gamedev streams and not really feeling like working on games at all for ~3 months. Ugh!!! I did manage to do some paper puzzle design and comics drawing in the meantime, but something was seriously not right.

October drawing close, I was contacted about a plan to make a small bundle of Halloween-themed games. This seemed like a potentially good way to get back on track gamedev-wise and I agreed, deciding on a whim on my game idea (or maybe it was more than a whim, I can’t remember. I think I had come up with the idea slightly before and decided to use it because it seemed funny?) Around this time I also had some blood tests taken and it turned out that I had a serious iron deficiency both in terms of hemoglobin and body iron reserves. And would you believe it, this turned out to have been the issue all along: getting some extra iron gave me motivation & energy back, and the restless leg syndrome went away, too! What’s funnier, a friend had recommended having my iron levels checked just before this (advice which I didn’t heed). Lesson of this story is: don’t get iron deficiency.

With the iron issue sorted out, I managed to finish The Plumber Thing, and this then led into a bunch of unrelated small games: Mamono Mower, Cavern Sweeper, Babataire, Babataire EX, a rerelease of Cavern of Flight, a rerelease & update of Once in Space, a holiday update to The Plumber Thing, some paper puzzles and finally It’s A Block-Pushing Game, fulfilling the goal of the year (or not, depending if the rereleases count). Overall I’m really happy with this year’s productivity, which is a bit surprising considering the iron deficiency. I also recorded a playthrough of a game I liked as a child, Lost Valley.

There are a couple things that were left somewhat or entirely unfulfilled over the year:

• Most of the games I did end up making weren’t part of the original list of monthly games. As stated, most of those were too scope-creepy for this project, but nonetheless.
• My sleep schedule is still mostly terrible, and I didn’t get enough exercise this year, spending most of the time sitting at my computer.
• I didn’t paint almost at all! And I mostly drew just the usual 4 comics I make annually for the student magazine. I mean, that’s definitely something, but I’d want to do some watercolours again.

And now, what’s planned for the next year?

• I’ll keep making some smaller games, although this time without an explicit count I’d aim for. There are a couple ideas I think I should be able to get done with semi-limited trouble, so hopefully at least some of those can become reality.
• It has started to feel that working on ESA2 might actually be fun again. Maybe? We’ll see! I’ll try to make ESA2 my main project next year, and actually get that thing somewhere instead of it staying forever in a limbo of sorts.
• The weekly streams will return; hopefully this time I won’t lose steam halfway through.
• I think it’s time to move on from Baba Is You, at least for the time being. Next April I’d have spent about 6 years of my life around Baba, and while it’s been largely an enjoyable ride (and I do have Baba-related ideas for the future, about which I’ll post when they’re ready to be revealed), it’d be nice to feel that the game as it is now is more or less a “finished” product. Note that this doesn’t mean that I won’t do anything more with/to BIY, but rather that I’d wish to mentally move on from the game and get the feeling that it’s where I want it to be.
• My internal deadline for getting my master’s degree in Psychology has been set to the beginning of April. There’s so little left!
• I’ll try to exercise more.

Here’s a list of the games released this year, alongside the source of inspiration for them (if I can remember it):

1. RUDE CHESS (A combination of pondering about randomness as a puzzle mechanic and my earlier No More Sweden 2018 entry, Chnakess)
2. It’s A Me! (A joke I made in AuthorBlues‘ Twitch stream chat and then realized sounded actually funny)
3. Keke in the Caves of Peril (My entry for Ludum Dare #48 finished and polished)
4. Baba Is You XTREME (Idea for an Aprils’ Fools version of Baba Is You)
5. Baba Friend (Based on that old desktop sheep toy, I’ve wanted to make one of these since forever)
6. The Plumber Thing (Can’t remember the exact thought process leading to it)
7. Mamono Mower (Exuno, Goost & Maurice from the Mystery Tournament community joked about odd combos of genres + the community has an inside joke about Lawn Mower, a NES game. Heavy inspiration from Mamono Sweeper)
8. Cavern of Flight rerelease (A 2016 Ludum Dare entry, which I edited slightly to remove some game-breaking bugs and rough edges)
9. Once in Space 2022 (Updated version of Once in Space from 2011, which in turn was a remake of Once in Space from 2007)
10. Babataire (An idea borne out of Cluj solitaire, which I saw in the Zachtronics Solitaire Collection)
11. Cavern Sweeper (A separate concept for Mamono Mower that I wanted to explore but removed from the lawn-mowing theme)
12. Babataire EX (A serious attempt to combine Baba Is You and solitaire)
13. It’s A Block-Pushing Game (Possibly started as a chess-themed sokoban idea? Can’t quite recall)

Maybe that’s enough of that?

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!

Download Once In Space 2022 on Itch.io here!

Download Cavern of Flight v1.3 on Itch.io here!

Hmm. There was a time when I actively didn’t understand the purpose of Twitter, but as I’ve gotten more into “professional” game development, its utility in sharing my work (and shitposting) has become more apparent to me, and despite the various issues with the site, for the past couple years I’ve mostly appreciated its existence. Especially maintaining the Baba Is You official Twitter account has been quite rewarding apart from some specific bad experiences.

Anyway, as it is, Twitter’s future looks somewhat uncertain, so like a lot of other people it seemed prudent to set up some alternative social media accounts for possible future use. At the moment my plan is to still use Twitter and just mirror relevant posts to these other sites, but we’ll see if that’ll change in the future. And who knows, maybe this means that I’ll post more here on my blog in the future?? Life can be odd like that.

Anyway:

Cohost: https://cohost.org/Hempuli

Mastodon: https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@Hempuli

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.

CHECK IT OUT