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.

Another month, another… month. Things have progressed mostly in quite a similar manner as before, but there have been some changes as well. A major thing is that I managed to finally restart my weekly streams, after failing to do so for the entirety of January due to Cat Reasons (and various others). At the moment Planet Keke has the main Tuesday development slot, while ESA2 stays as the Thursday game.

In other streaming news, MelonyPepon‘s crew of mostly-vtuber streamers kindly invited me to play games on stream with them on the weekends, and for the past three or so weeks we’ve had a good time playing Among Us, Jackbox & Gartic Phone. I haven’t really done this kind of social streaming before so it’s been a fun change of pace.

The covemountlike series has also continued, and I’ve now released 9 of these in total this year. The ones released after the previous monthly update are:

• Powermount
• Ueqouow
• Covejank

In non-computer news, the cats have been getting along really nicely. Fondue still needs a bunch of time to be comfortable around guests, but Vilma’s and Fondue’s playing now ends in hisses much more rarely and there was even a recent instance of Vilma climbing onto the sofa and the cats sleeping there together!

The year has started with a lot going on. Games-wise, the important thing is that I’ve released 6 little browser-based block-pushing puzzle games. It all started with being inspired by a discussion about movement counters in puzzle games in the Thinky Puzzles Discord server, and at this point I’ve actually managed to get out a couple longer-time puzzle ideas that have occupied my brain but not felt inspiring enough to implement. I’ve some more ideas for tiny browser puzzlers, so look forward to that, I guess. Here’re the current ones, in order of release:

• Covemount
• That’s a Warp
• Pultimush
• Lorgeban
• Nabogorf
• Mountinuum

In other news, I adopted a second cat, Fondue! A lot of January was spent on getting her more used to the house, me, and Vilma, and while there’s still ways to go especially when it comes to playing with Vilma, she’s progressed amazingly!

I also recorded a series of videos on Youtube about her process of getting used to her new home. You can watch them from the start here!

Due to me being ill, having some worries, and taking care of Fondue-Vilma relations, I failed to start my weekly streaming. I’m currently trying to get that sorted out but my daily schedule has been even more chaotic than usual due to the cats so it’s a work-in-progress.

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?

Hi everyone! My internship is now over and while I haven’t graduated, a big step on my way into psychologisthood has now been taken.

Anyway, I didn’t manage to write much of anything here during the internship, but near the end of the year I started making some plans on what I’d like to change in my life for 2022, and I thought it’d make sense to share some of those plans, insofar as they relate to game development. Most of this is copy-pasted from my personal Discord server, but whatever.

I’ve noted that a big problem for my work & everyday life is how difficult it usually is to differentiate between work and non-work, especially on the internet. In order to improve on this, I’ll try to follow a slightly stricter schedule this year in terms of when I do what. I drafted a tentative sketch for what my workweek might look like:

Mon-Wed: Work on ESA2 and other non-Baba game projects
Wed: Stream 1 – work on ESA2 and other non-Baba game projects
Thur-Fri: Work on Baba Is You
Fri: Stream 2 – work on Baba Is You
Sat-Sun: Time off; I probably won’t be able to keep my mind off videogames so I won’t pretend that I wouldn’t do any game work here, but I’ll try to keep it very relaxed and non-work-like.

I might on some weeks switch the days around or make other changes, stream more often and so on, but it’d be nice to have a general guideline to follow that I can refer to when pondering what to do on a given day and how to spend my days.

Relating to the “other non-Baba game projects”, I have a largeish plan for 2022 that’ll be the other major non-Baba thing alongside ESA2: I want to make a small game every month this year! The idea would be that I take one idea that I’ve pondered about but not implemented and make a prototype out of it, 12 times over the year. However, my goal would be to actually have something playable, not just a rough proof-of-concept. I’m pretty excited about this concept! I might use a format similar to what Petri Purho used during the year that gave us Crayon Physics, in that even though I’ll make a game every month, I’ll only work 7 days maximum on a given game. We’ll see!

Oh yeah, also Baba Is You got its major update, Baba Make Level, last November! Kind of embarrassing that I wrote nothing about it here, but as I said in some previous post, I’ll try to get a round-up “what’s cooking” post done sometime and address all the little things I haven’t mentioned here there and then.

Happy new year!

Baba is still coming along; a lot has happened in terms of e.g. bugs being fixed and so on, but at the same time those large milestones of 1) finishing the editor and 2) finishing the upcoming extra levelpacks are still yet to be achieved. But we go forward, and lately I’ve streamed more often and that has been very helpful for progress.

Baba Is You was speedrun by Succinct_and_Punchy at the Games Done Quick online event last week, 21st of August. It was really cool! People seemed to be very excited about the run and in general were extremely supportive. Thank you!

As seen above, among other changes I’ve added two new characters to the game: Fofo and Jiji. I feel that one more character might be warranted but I’m quite happy about these two for now.

I streamed Baba Is You development to see if I still feel. The editor trudges onward, and during this stream I implemented a bunch of polishing touches and fixed many smaller bugs. It’s a terrible never-ending swamp of things to do but at the same time I feel like we’re reasonably close.

I was planning to stream ESA 2 as well, but wanted to keep the stream reasonably short and ended up not doing that after all.

One thing I need to concentrate on sometime soon is work on the two new levelpacks that’ll be released with the editor; I’ve been keeping them on hold for a couple months now and especially the “New Adventures” pack is lagging behind pretty badly by now. Similarly, I’d like to get at least 2 more tunes done for Baba and those take time to get going; I hope I can get them implemented in time.

Streamed some 5 hours tonight, fixing a whole bunch of issues in Baba Is You, but also taking the time to implement a bit of stuff for ESA 2 as well! I’m trying to avoid the issue I ran into previously where my enemy designs are overly complicated and all-purpose and as a result the level design becomes difficult. I’m still kind of learning the scale of the new 8×8 tile size – I haven’t fully internalized how high the player can jump and seeing which passages will feel too cramped and which in turn are too open is tough. Still, progress is progress!

More streaming! I really need to set up my standing desk again, these past days have caused stomach pains possibly partially because of all the sitting.

I managed to fix a whole bunch of small issues and add handy hotkeys and other quality-of-life features for the editor. The editor is actually starting to feel pretty nice to use, I’d say, and that’s exciting! I also added the train sprite above; not sure why, exactly, but it felt fitting.

Took a bit of a break from streaming! Got back to it a week or so ago, although I’ve still been somewhat low on energy. Today I did a longer 6-hour stream and got a lot of stuff done in Baba, including the above word “Feeling”, some additions to the object colouring system, bugfixes, and more. There was a nicely active set of viewers throughout and that helped a lot with motivation, too!