I had a massive 8+-hour stream yesterday and another of some 4-5 hours today; I spent most of those working on the penguin game (now titled “Stumblehill”). I’d like to get the game’s levels done before GDC but that’s looking somewhat unlikely. I finished the second level on Saturday and worked on the game’s map today. It seems that the biggest slowing factor is the need for extra assets, and hopefully the third level won’t be quite as demanding in that regard.
I’ll be leaving for the Game Developers Conference on the 18th of March! From there it’ll be a week of probably outrageous amounts of social interaction and receiving Baba compliments from various directions. I’m not *super* stressed about this but I’m sure it’s a force that affects my mood on the background. It’d be really cool to get a prize in the IGF! The beginning week will probably be mostly work on first Stumblehill, then making sure that Baba works at GDC.
What else… 7drl was last week and I started making some simple prototypes but (maybe luckily?) I couldn’t concentrate on them much due to all this vidyagame hubbub.
I’ve had a little sideproject going for a bit and it needs to be finished pretty soon so for the past couple weeks I’ve been concentrating on that instead of Baba; apart from some polish and bugginess most of what I want to have in Baba before GDC is there which is great! March will probably absolutely terrifyingly busy so getting any errant projects out of the way beforehand seems like a good plan.
Anyway! During today’s stream I drew some more art for the project shown above (more info coming soon) and added a new level to Baba. It feels funny and fun to do higher-resolution art for a change; apart from animation I’m enjoying it a lot! Very different.
Things are very exciting right now! Sadly a lot of the excitement will become more available to others at a later date, but at least I can post gamedev updates every now and then. Once things settle down a bit I’ll count how many weekly streams I’ve missed and do some kinda marathon, that might be fun. Sorry!!
So yeah, my ability to stream weekly has been superbly bad for a while now. Unfortunately it’ll probably get worse before it gets betterm what with the upcoming GDC and so on! I’ll try to do better, believe me!
In any case, today’s stream was very active and productive! I finally divided the game’s map into sub-areas containing thematically similar levels (example above). This has been on the to-do list for a while now but because I’m sure there are several bugs with the sub-map system still & I’ve had to have a testable version available I haven’t dared to really get to it. A quick test already turned up several bugs, although nothing too serious. Once this map system is stable enough, I’ll start laying down the final theming of the levels, sculpting the “main” map and implementing missing features (for example locks that require a certain amount of completed levels to open). Also more music!
Here’s a teaser of an underwater-themed song I made:
Well, well, well… A new year! It has definitely started in a very hectic manner for me, what with all the IGF business. I streamed today for the first time this year, and actually got a pretty large system finished!
Originally I had planned for all the levels to use the same object palette by default, with level-specific changes possible to be done via the level editor. However, after implementing this I realized that I’ll want to have several, maybe even over a dozen levels that use the same changes (to create “areas” or clusters of levels that are thematically similar), and doing all the changes by hand every time would get old fast, both for me and potential users who want to use the editor. Therefore I’ve now implement a theme system, where I can edit and save a theme with a specified palette & changes to the objects, and then load that theme into a level. So next I’ll just have to create themes for all these environments/themes I want to have and apply them to the levels accordingly.
I’ve been dabbling with the level editor for a long time now and I hope this change allows me to move forward, at least for a little while!!
Well would you look at that, Baba Is You was nominated finalist in 4 categories at the Independent Games Festival, the largest (?) indie game competition in the world. One of these is even the grand prize! Here’s the full list:
SEUMAS MCNALLY GRAND PRIZE
EXCELLENCE IN DESIGN
NUOVO AWARD (Basically the “innovative experimental stuff” award)
BEST STUDENT GAME (I’m still a student at the University of Helsinki, mind you!)
So yeah, this is very exciting news for me! Can’t wait to get this game actually done!!!
In related news, I’ll be traveling to the Game Developers’ Conference in March, partially to finally attend this magical event I’ve been hearing so much about, but also partially because I felt that Baba had garnered enough semi-spontaneous interest that it’d be a good idea to show it off in a larger event. Being a finalist in a bunch of categories is a really good additional reason to go, so I guess I’m happy I am doing just that?
…I didn’t actually make it. Technically, at least. I couldn’t get OA done to a passable point in time, so I sent the same version as last year. Thanks for help with submitting the game, Petri!
IGF deadline is on the 17th, and I’ve been working on the updated, physics-based version of Officer Alfred in order to get some kind of a test version for the competition. At the moment I’m still a bit unsure whether I’ll be able to get anything done in time, but the game’s level editor is looking pretty snazzy already:
