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.
The blind speedrunning community (i.e. people who speedrun games they haven’t seen before, prima vista) had a showcase of their Mystery Tournament last weekend on the Games Done Quick Twitch channel, and as a special thing I made a small game for them to speedrun. The game I made is called Oh! My Roommate Is a Lasergun?!, and it’s essentially a remake of GENERIC Platformer, which I made in 2009. The game utilizes old things in other ways, too; the background art was originally made for… Timerocketxby? Or maybe GENERIC itself? It’s hard to remember. Anyway, I recycled the assets here. The music was also originally made as little Shovel Knight -inspired test tunes in 2016, but with a little touching-up they made for very fine in-game tracks.
After ~4 years of trying and failing, I finally took part in the 7-Day Roguelike Challenge (or 7DRL, as it’s generally known as) last week (https://7drl.com/). I still failed to finish my game in time, but compared to the only previous time I’ve actually managed to create something (in 2016), the addition of lua to my repertoire allowed quite a bit faster development and I actually got pretty far with my project. Sadly, after streaming for 8 hours on one day, I had a headache for 2 consecutive days and that kind of destroyed my chances of actually finishing. Still, I’m pretty happy with what I have now and thus decided that instead of submitting an obviously unfinished game for the challenge, I’ll try to poke at it and make it available when some of the more obvious missing features are in.
I’m especially happy about the font.
In other news! I was looking at the nice list of months in the blog sidebar, and it suddenly dawned on me that this blog is now over 10 years old! My inability to post regularly has consistently kept it from being as neat as it could be, but I’m nonetheless very happy that some kind of a catalogue of my past game-development endeavours has stayed alive this long. Thanks to Excavatorrr for giving me the push to set this up originally.
Now let’s see if we’ll get another 10 years of use out of this…!
Oh yeah, and one more (set of) thing(s): I was going to give a talk about Baba Is You at the Game Developers Conference, The MiXit conference and an event called Addon, but the first two have been canceled thanks to COVID-19, and since the third would be organized in France, I would be very surprised if it wasn’t cancelled as well. I’m currently also awaiting word on what’ll happen with Nordic Game Jam this year. Wild times.
So, Gamescom happened, as did Sommerhus Jam, and combined with work on Noita I have had a hard time keeping up streams. Managed to have one tonight, though, so maybe this is the time for yet another return to form!(?)
I fixed various issues in Baba, most importantly a relatively long-standing logic issue. I ran into another that I thought I had fixed for good; there was a pretty simple solution available but I’m slightly afraid that said solution causes some other hairy cornercases (that I had previously fixed and forgotten about.) I guess I should document why I’ve done things the way they are at some point.
I also spent some time working on the game’s music; the Forest theme gives me trouble and while I found some new directions, the song will need more work still to get to a state where I’m happy with it.
All in all the stream was fairly productive and I actually finished all the things I had planned to; now just to keep that momentum somehow!
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.
So, last time I streamed I promised a weekly update for the next day. As it turns out I forgot to do that and here we are, over a week has passed with no weekly updates. Whoops!! I’m also 2 updates late to begin with. WHOOPS!!! I can’t remember at all what I did during the stream I didn’t make an update of, so let’s just leave it at that.
Today I added more words to Baba, along with some little graphical polish in preparation to changes to how the sprites are positioned on-screen. Stuff was tedious, yo, but now it’s done and that’s good. One of the new words can be seen in the gif above.
Last weekend I was at the Sommerhus Game Jam in Vellerup, Denmark. It was a fun cozy tiny little jam, there being about 10 people attending in total. The theme was ‘Me’, but I ended up working on Baba most of the time (along with having saunas and doing other summer cottagey things). I had a couple ideas but mostly they were too ambitious or I lacked the motivation to create them. I did finish a tiny thing, so if you’re interested you can download that here.
