Hempuli's blog

I had removed a couple games from the main webpage some years ago; they’re now back. The main titles this has affected are Cwoun, Excavatorrr, Paradise Fort and BulletZORZ (which was entirely unlisted.) Masjin is still out-of-order but I’ll get to that soon.

I haven’t been posting because I haven’t been streaming lately; I’ll try to do a general “what’s going on” post soonish.

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.

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.

More streaming, more ESA2 and Baba! Baba Is You’s still in the endless swamp of level editor work; as the editor gets more complex, working on it also gets more arduous and scary. However, I’ll soon be at the stage to technically try to implement the actual online functionality! That’ll be scary in its own way, but fairly exciting as well!

On ESA 2’s side, I’ve kept adding more basic features; today’s stream included the conveyor belts, bounce shots and coloured shots seen above. I also did some tileset tests last stream and I think I’m finally starting to feel OK about the colours and visual look of the game. That’s a huge relief.

Finally got to stream a bit again. I’ve been getting tired quite early lately, which is good for purposes of going to sleep at a reasonable time, but less ideal for purposes of getting streaming done.

In any case, streaming happened today! It was a short one, less than 2 hours, but I got some really neat stuff relating to Baba’s translation done. Certain languages will need using a special font instead of the game’s in-built, hand-drawn one, and this stream was spent on implementing the rendering of said special font. Tedious and at times frustrating stuff, but everything went really smoothly here in the end which was a really welcome surprise!

Really looking forward to getting this part of the development handled. This Autumn is looking to become extremely, extremely busy, because I’ll have to finish some very important university-related work. We’ll see how that goes; it might be that I’ll have to postpone some Baba-related work in order to get certain courses done with dignity (or even just done, haha.)

Another stream where I worked on three different games! ESA got a much-needed little fix, ESA 2 went forward some and Baba saw a couple bugfixes as well. I also implemented a system that makes it easier to understand what’s happening when an object tries to move but is immediately returned to its origin, as seen above.

There’s so much stuff to do! I had a vacation of sorts last week but had to spend it preparing for an exam – another week would’ve been very much welcome. As it is, progress on these various projects is ponderous but at least I haven’t burned out.

I’ve been playing Cultist Simulator again, and combined with Sunless Skies I’m feeling a foolish urge to try to make something story-driven. I don’t think I’d actually be able to make anything sensible story-wise, though.

(Alternatively, check the official Nintendo version here: Yeah)

Right! Baba will be released very soon, and that’s great. I’m a week or so late with this blogpost, but eh, I’ve gotten some evidence that some people actually follow this blog from time to time, and I want to support that.

The game will cost USD $15, or 12.50€ if you prefer that. Wishlisting the game on Steam would be massively useful at the moment, so consider doing that if you haven’t yet.

I’m really excited about seeing videos & streams of the game – even though seeing someone get stuck in a game you made can be really frustrating/discouraging, there’s always some entertainment as well, plus I really hope I get to see someone appreciate some of the more inventive moments of the game.

I’ve also been slowly putting together the OST of the game. Due to various reasons, some of which were discussed in that earlier Baba post, there has been need for a lot of tweaking to make the music sound nice for the official soundtrack. The side-effect of that is that the in-game music has improved some as well, so while the process is exhausting, it hopefully increases the overall audio quality, little by little.

Anyway, there’ll be more news coming soon – I really need to remember to update here because I’m very fond of this blog. Slowly getting used to this block system of WordPress’, too!

Hello!
There have been a couple streams since the last time I did a “”””weekly”””” update, but for whatever reason I couldn’t muster the energy to make proper blogposts to commemorate them.

Anyway! Things have been going semi-swimmingly, Baba-wise – the game is now feature-complete (to an extent), and we’re just handling some final timing and business stuff related to releasing a game. Baba will be on Steam, Humble Store, itch.io and Nintendo Switch™, and it’ll support Mac and Linux on top of just Windows! Huge thanks to MP2 Games for making this large a selection of platforms a possibility (by porting the game). An inevitable result is, of course, that there’s way more stuff to be handled before release. We’ll see how everything turns out.

A cool thing about Baba is that this time I’ve made the OST by myself! This resulted in a huge mess right before finishing the game, but has otherwise been pretty cool and confidence-boosting. It also means that I’ll get to set up a Bandcamp page! (And deal with “mastering” sound, what does that even mean)

As for the “huge mess”, we were a couple minutes away from calling the game done and sending it forward for further approval when I notified Mathias (the person behind MP2 Games) about worse audio quality on other platforms. Pretty soon it turned out that the issue was in my computer only, and the culprit was the AudioWizard program on my control panel having been set to Music Mode by default. I had spent a bunch of time trying to remove any involuntary audio enhancements from this laptop back in 2015 when I got it, but apparently I had managed to miss this utility that actually did affect my audio output rather heavily. Music Mode in this case meant some combination of equalizers and compressors that e.g. heavily (*very* heavily) emphasized bass. After turning the setting off, the sound quality wasn’t necessarily “worse”, but certain songs had ear-hurting sounds in them that had been smoothed over by the Music Mode, and some songs sounded much thinner without the bass boost.

I went into full emergency mode and contacted some very talented audio designer friends in seek of help. In the end we realized that I can just run the audio through the Music Mode effect and re-record the adjusted sound using Stereo Mix to get the bass-boosted result. However, the earlier bass boost had also brought some uncomfortable audio elements of its own that I had mostly ignored until now, so even with the relatively simple solution I had to spend some 3-4 days editing and re-mixing everything, especially since the effect also affected SFX. Mathias very kindly implemented a batch tool for me so that replacing the SFX wasn’t quite as time-consuming as it otherwise would’ve been.

But that’s now history, and there haven’t seemed to be any new massive hindrances to handle. I’ll be going to GDC in March both for Baba and as a part of the Nolla Games team to promote our upcoming game, Noita. I’ve also ordered some new Baba-related merch to celebrate the occasion. I just wish flying wasn’t such a planet-hurting move. Same for the merch on a smaller scale, actually.

I’d kinda like to do an image-heavy update as an apology for continuously not managing to keep this blog alive, but this new WordPress system is a bit scary and I have a headache so that might have to wait for a later necromancy post. I’ll try to keep the blog updated with new Baba info, and ESA2 once I finally get that far.

P.S. I’ve been enjoying Cultist Simulator by Weather Factory a whole lot again. Very inspiring, beautiful-sounding and -looking!

Streaming continues to be more of a thing! Great! I streamed yesterday and today, and both streams were quite similar in that most work was done on fixing small issues, implementing audio, and picking at the remaining ending sequence effects. The “must-have” to-do list is getting pretty short, but there are a handful of scary-looking things left that potentially require a good amount of work (or just overcoming the fear of implementing them.)

SFX has been ignored for a while now, so getting some of that done today felt great. The various “fanfares” for achieving things is especially scary, but at least there’re only a handful of those to make.

Music-wise I’m missing at least 2-4 songs: I want to have a remix of the theme song to play in the credits, + there are three areas that don’t have their own themes. However, at least one of those areas could technically do without a unique theme, so I’ll have to try to prioritize the less-optional songs/features first and see if I have time and/or energy for the remaining songs.

Everything related to the ending of the game feels scary to make for a variety of reasons, but as long as my ambitions regarding it stay relatively small, there shouldn’t be all that much left to implement.

It’s been a pretty wild year – maybe I should do a separate end-of-the-year post?

Huh, WordPress looks very different now. I kinda miss the old system. Anyway! After a month+ of no game development streams, I managed to implement some Baba rule changes on-stream today. Progress was very smooth, although at the very end I realized a rather unfortunate implication of the system I was implementing that I’ll have to mull over. Still, very nice! I also played a couple Ludum Dare entries to close the stream off.

The end of the year is closing in on us, and that means I’ll have to get Baba to its finalized state sometime soon! Especially the audio is something I’ve been overlooking for too long now – gotta have to concentrate my efforts on that.

Hmm; I seem to have managed to keep something like a once-every-two-weeks streaming schedule. That’s good, I guess? Today’s stream wasn’t very productive; I mostly polished things in Baba and drew a couple new sprites, but wasn’t really in a good state of mind for spriting so the results aren’t mega convincing. I also started at a level for a good while without getting good ideas for what to do with it, and so on. But that happens! I just need to have a bit better of an idea of what to do if things aren’t going my way during a stream in the future.

I’ve mentioned this on Twitter already, but I should’ve said it here already: Baba Is You’s release is delayed until 2019! I think I might’ve been able to finish the game this year, but I wouldn’t have had time to properly handle all the ~Business Stuff~ related to releasing a game, so delaying felt like the sensible option.

Also, Baba will release on Nintendo Switch! I might’ve said this before, but yup, that’s a thing! It’ll release simultaneously on Steam and Switch, and matpow2 is doing the porting.

Also also, I was at IndieCade Europe, held in Paris, a week ago, and Baba Is You won the audience award there! The award statue is really cool-looking, I should take pics. Whee!