Hempuli's blog

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?

No More Sweden 2018 was last weekend, and it was a fairly good time. The venue, STPLN in Malmö, was sweet as usual and managed to be generally not too warm despite the general temperature. I even got to swim in the ocean – there’s a really nice large pier nearby and the water was really comfortably warm.

Anyway, I managed to finish some stuff despite taking it easy and spending a lot of time just chilling and playing boardgames. My themes were Sand Dunes and Chain reaction, which led me initially down the path of creating a cellular automata -style terraforming/citybuilding thing. I didn’t get very far, but here’s a neat landscaping thing:

My plans changed abruptly when someone (whose name I don’t remember :( ) sitting near me showed their idea of a turn-based snake game with the objective being defeating all enemies rather than eating fruit. Seeing this made me think of some concepts regarding roguelikes and chess pieces, and I got the concept of combining chess and snake in my head. I felt slightly bad about drawing so directly from someone else’s idea, but I really wanted to try this concept and ended up making it my entry. The game’s called Chnakess and I think it goes in a fairly different direction than a more general snake-with-enemies would have gone.

The game’s essentially a puzzle game where you try to eat all the chess pieces as the snake. I managed to create several different scenarios with different layouts, and although there are some bugs I think the result is pretty solid as far as 48-hour chill gamejam things go.

So yeah, all in all a very nice weekend. This month will be extraordinarily busy so these little moments of possible relaxation are especially valuable. If I have an empty moment somewhere I might update Chnakess a bit to add more chess elements, such as castling. We’ll see.

UGhghg, even when disregarding the sloppy weekly progress updates, I’ve been extremely bad at keeping this blog up to date with things I’ve been doing! Let’s try to fix that! Here’re some things I’ve made during the past several months:

– I made a game for Ludum Dare 41! It’s called Super Metabolism Bros, and it’s a kind of a mix of Dwarf Fortress -like real-time strategy with autonomous agents and platforming. The idea ended up being very rough and buggy, but it was a fun little thing and part of my long-enduring fascination with autonomous agents in games and pathfinding. FrankieSmileShow played the game on-stream and it was a fun time. I had a lot more plans (bacteria, at least) but didn’t have time for those.

– I had my 2-week Summer holiday a week ago, and during it I toyed around with shaders to create this fake 3D effect. It’s very satisfying to create this kind of stuff, although whether it’ll become anything or not will have to be seen. It’d be neat to make a cardgame or a boardgame with this style! (Alexis Kennedy’s Cultist Simulator definitely inspired me a lot)

– Stumblehill is done! It was featured as a part of Humble Bundle’s Monthly Bundle for July. There were some bugs at launch but they should be gone now, although I do plan to update the game a bit more before I call it fully finished. All in all, the project was fun and while I left things very much too late, the result turned out to be fairly neat. This also helped me a lot to get a feel for digital painting, although digital animation is something that feels way beyond me. Massive thanks to Anna Magdalino for the audio and Lucy Green for the writing!

– After a lengthy break, I’ve returned to work on ESA 2! However, because of various reasons I’ve decided to re-do the game from nearly scratch. I’m going to reuse assets where I can, but it’s still a bunch of work. Sorry about that! But I think the game will benefit from rethought. I’m currently setting up the editor and basics of the engine, but it shouldn’t be too long until I’ll be able to get to work on the actual map again.

– Also, I’ve finally updated ESA 1! Some bugs have been fixed, you can now skip the end credits if you’ve seen them already, and there have been some optimizations to the level loading times that should help especially older computers to handle the game. Many of these little changes have been made with speedrunners in mind.

– Baba Is You progresses onwards, somewhat slower now but nevertheless. I think I’ll do a separate post of interesting Baba gifs and whatnot in the future, but not mentioning it in this general update would be odd. On the video you can heard some tracks I’ve composed for the game.

I’ll also be participating in the No More Sweden game jam again this year. It’ll be held in the beginning of August in Malmö, Sweden. It’ll be good to meet some friends and maybe make some jam games. :)

Ok! After a couple months of almost total silence, I’m trying to get back to weekly updates & streams. Today I worked on Baba’s map art, seen above in its WIP state, as well as restructuring it to make more sense. I kind of dreaded streaming beforehand but it was good fun once I got going. I’ll be trying to stream ESA 2 a bit more in upcoming streams because I’ll need to work on Baba outside of streams as well.

In other news:
– I won the Excellence in Design & Best Student Game awards at IGF! I’m aware that this update is over 2 months after the fact, but looks like I didn’t post about it.
– Stumblehill, the penguin game, is pretty much done! It was quite exhausting to concentrate solely on it so I’m happy that I can soon leave it behind.
– I’ll be going to No More Sweden, the oddly-named game jam, in July!

Let’s see if I can get this to work, now!

Just a moment ago I finally realized something I should’ve realized years and years ago, and decided that the best way to approach it would be to write an open apology.

Over the years of participating in Ludum Dares and other game jams, I have partly unthinkingly and partly knowingly cheated and otherwise acted maliciously in ways that have made my results look better than they deserve. This has happened in two ways:

• Using certain bits of MMF2 code I had made earlier to get started with a game project faster, and
• Using the “submission hour” to add content and polish/tweaks

In earlier LDs I’ve taken part in it’s also possible that I’ve added content after the deadline along with bugfixes, but I’m not certain of the extent of this kind of behaviour and I’m fairly certain it hasn’t happened in recent years (not that that makes it acceptable to have happened before!)

The former category of cheating has mostly concerned certain relatively simple “modules” that I’ve added to my projects upon starting to work on them; it would’ve been quite trivial to re-implement the same features during the actual compo and I doubt I’ve gained much advantage via this abuse of the rules; this of course doesn’t make my behaviour any less wrong, merely a bit dumber.
Using the “submission hour” for polish and features has definitely affected the quality of my entries significantly; I have no excuse for this behaviour.

It makes me angry at myself to have abused the goodwill of the community in such a way and I’m very very sorry that I’ve acted this way. The reason behind this kind of behaviour is probably partially in my own naïvete; when I first participated in LD I was much younger and thus had less of a moral compass, and after that it’s been easier to point at past offences and think “well, I did that before so I don’t have to care now, either”, or just not think about the whole issue in the first place. I’m glad I’ve realized that this way of thinking is actively malicious and morally wrong, but I’m really sad it took me this long to actually decide to acknowledge it and the awful things I’ve done. What makes me feel even more awful is the fact that I’ve manipulated my time lapse videos so that this behaviour couldn’t be seen in them.

So, again, I’m very deeply sorry to have acted in such a malicious manner, and I apologize for having been as dumb and mean as I have. Ludum Dare has been a very important part of my game developer hobby for these past 7 years and I’ve learned a lot and enjoyed all the experiences related to the event; I just wish this kind of attitude hadn’t been a part of it behind the scenes, or at least that I’d have been morally sound enough to stop doing it, feel genuinely sorry and apologize a long time ago.

As a gesture that someone hopefully finds useful, I’ve decided to upload the bits of engine I’ve re-used in many of my LD games; right now I can recall two that I’ve utilized in multiple entries (especially the latter can be found in nearly every entry):

• A simple platforming engine. The version I’ll include here contains some extra functionality, such as slopes, because I’m not completely certain on whether I’ve used only the simplest form in a cheaty manner or also this more advanced one.
• A system for quickly resizing the game window to a multiplier of its original size. This is a very simple piece of code, but as a result also very easy to quickly add to a project at the start of development.

Additionally I’ve used Adam “Sketchy” Hawker’s pathfinding tutorial in multiple entries, and while I’m not certain of how much of the tutorial code I’ve copied directly to my entries, I have a memory that suggests that I’ve done so and renamed variables afterwards to make this less apparent. This is awful.

I have used these two particular engine pieces in a similarly cheaty way in other game jams, such as No More Sweden and Nordic Game Jam, for similarly dumb and irresponsible reasons, although without the intention to act maliciously (if that matters).

I hope that the fact that I bring this matter up on my own helps prove that I genuinely feel very sorry about it and wish to be a better person in the future. It’ll be somewhat scary to see what’ll come out of this, but in the end whatever possible bad outcomes are deserved and I’m nevertheless sure that this is the right thing to do, right now.

Here are the two pieces of engine mentioned:

Platforming engine (with slopes) – ThePodunkian kindly taught me the basics of this design years ago (in 2008, maybe?)

Screen size multiplier – I’m fairly sure I implemented this myself and refined it over the years.

Seems like Adam’s pathfinding tutorials are no longer available; I feel slightly uncomfortable uploading them as they are, but if anyone wants I can make a tutorial based on the system I’ve used.

I’ll be posting this on twitter & the Ludum Dare blog; hopefully all relevant parties will see it.

Well, that game jam was last weekend. And it was lots of fun! Swam in the ocean for the first time this Summer and talked a lot with cool people; game development tends to be not that social most of the time so these moments where I can meet other game developers stand out nicely.

During the actual jam part I started to make a simple board-gameish online game where players have different jobs with different missions and have to carry them out. One of them is a traitor, with the mission to spoil everyone else’s objectives. I didn’t get quite as far as I had hoped, only managing the basic gameplay without the actual objectives, but it was fun making an online multiplayer game again. I probably wont keep working on it, but I might revisit the concept at a later date (although I do have several projects to work on at the moment anyway).

In other news, the game development streams I’ve been doing have been really enjoyable because it’s easier to concentrate on a project when I can’t just stop the moment I feel annoyed by a bug. This has also helped working on multiple projects at once. So thanks, everyone who has joined to watch the streams!

Also, Environmental Station Alpha’s Soundtrack is now out, for $2,99! Go check it out!

Last year NMS was quite a disaster for me due to some personal problems, but this year has been a ton of fun! I even managed to finish something. Other indie developers are mostly really cool people and it’s cool to be able to follow the creative processes of other people over the weekend. Also instead of the usual pizza’n’burger -type diet, the local shop sells relatively cheap salads, so the overall atmosphere has been surprisingly healthy!

My game is called PILARI, and it’s a two-player arcade thing where the players fight against each other using bombs. I got a sudden inspiration to make a pillar-based topdown platformer engine, but couldn’t decide on where to take it, which made me end up making a simple deathmatch thing. It might still be fun? At least it looks somewhat cool.

~CONTROLS~

ESC – enable gamepad
Control/Q – drop a bomb. Hold for a moment to drop a more powerful one. You can only have two bombs at a time, and when you’re charging a new bomb the other one wont count down. You can use the explosions to propel yourself and your other bomb to the air, since you can’t damage yourself. Landing on the enemy’s head damages them.
Shift/Tab – Jump. Kind of useless mostly.
Arrows/WASD – move.

I think I’ll use the same engine for something in the future. :)

Download the game at Unicorn 7!

Sorry to whoever happens to read this blog and expects news about ESA; I’ve been working on a brand-new Officer Alfred editor, and I got to say that this time around it’s looking much better than last year! That gif was made entirely in an MMF-built level editor, which makes me quite proud (I shouldn’t be). Hopefully the loading times wont be atrocious.

As for ESA, I added some new cool stuff but I’m a bit stumped about a certain design thing. How to persuade a player to search for something less obvious instead of going in a straight line without having stupid plot-based walls?

No More Sweden 2013 will be held this month, and I’ll be there! Way cool! Hopefully I’ll get some GAMES made, woop!

So yeah, that one was some 2 weeks ago, but I completely forgot to mention anything about it here.

It was a lot of fun! We were in Malmö, and I held a presentation showing off the games I’ve been working on (ESA, Officer Alfred & Beyond the Black Hole). I saw a lot of cool games from other people, made new friends and ate bettern food than I would’ve expected from a nerd gathering (didn’t eat a single pizza during the whole trip!)

The coolest thing about the venue was that there was a free-for-all workshop downstairs, with a high-quality laser cutter, tons of useless wood and metal (and bicycles). One of the organizers, Martin Jonasson, had created some custom-made arcade cabinets with his friend there, and we got to make games for them during the jam-part of the event. The coolest was a 4-player cabinet, which looked like this:

I of course made a game for it. Due to the cabinet not being tested very extensively, there were some problems with the controls; apparently the cabinet couldn’t send all input so it might be that one of the players couldn’t move at all if the others were using all of their buttons. Fortunately, this problem was partially solved during the event, and the games people made could be played to their full extent.

I worked with Erik Rönnblom, and together we made a game called “The Boulder Will Kill You”. In the game all the players are chained to a boulder, and thus drag it along wherever they go. The point of the game is to get the boulder into a specifically marked area. This grants the players points and more time to move about.
Have a screenshot:

I also started to work on a simple, humorous cardgame, but didn’t manage to finish it:

Yaay, more enemies.

Also, this year’s No More Sweden is slowly approaching – the event will be 20th of July. If you live near Malmö, Sweden, I suggest that you visit the event website!