People who have followed my increasingly-infrequent streams already knew this, I guess, but it’s now official – Baba Is You will get this cool, official (and hopefully polished-ish) level editor next year! What’s even neater is that it’ll support sharing your levels with other players over the internet!! Exact details of what that means will come later, though.
Relatedly, I streamed both yesterday and today after a long(?) break, adding stuff to the editor. Today’s big thing was the ability to remove objects from your “object palette”; it feels like removing entries from a list/database is always somewhat more precarious than adding them (although, now that I think of it, in this specific case the adding was also quite precarious because it had to be implemented on top of Baba’s existing editor structures without breaking them.) Anyway, the deletion system seemed to work very neatly almost from the get-go, so that’s excellent.
Future streams (which’ll probably be still quite erratic; I moved recently and the rest of the year (and the beginning of next year) is looking way too busy) will probably be largely about these same topics; it’d be cool to get the editor out next spring, but I’m not holding my breath (I think.)
The past couple streams have concentrated on Baba’s level editor’s object selector. Making a robust system that doesn’t break down but allows stuff like searching & tags has been relatively fun but also a *lot* of work. It’s kind of funny to think that once this bit of the editor works, it might turn out to be the single largest hurdle to overcome. Possibly not, but I like the idea.
On top of Baba, some work was recently done on fixing the (final?) outstanding issues in Stumblehill. It’d be neat to add a bit more content to that game, but it’s probably for the best if I don’t add another tentative thing onto the already-overflowing to-do -list.
Streamed some Baba development and a *little* bit of ESA2. Baba work included a small step forward with the official editor, implementing the Turn-word seen above, investigating a mystery cornercase bug and redesigning a level I didn’t like (not sure if it’s better now, though.) I intended to do more ESA2 stuff, but work there ended up being mostly small editor features and replaying the old version a bunch.
Got a small stream done tonight! There’s still a little bit of translation work to be done, but things are looking pretty nice on that front. It sure has taken some time, though, thanks to my bumbling. Today I fixed various tiny issues with certain translation-related code and tried to redesign a level I dislike, unsuccessfully. Oh well!!
Today’s stream saw me finally draw the cyrillic alphabet for Baba Is You! The game won’t be fully localized but we’re doing translations of the UI for a bunch of languages and it’s neat to get forward with that. I’m quite happy with how the symbols look in the game’s doodly font.
I also had time to work a bit on ESA 2; I fixed some bugs and started adding some needed features for the game’s level editor. It’d be neat to finally get to the point where I can start building some rooms, though!
More streaming! Today’s streaming was mostly just fixing a couple bugs in Baba, then implementing some final bits of translation code and starting some complicated level editor code. Slow-going but pretty neat.
I also demonstrated ESA 2’s original version on-stream and started feeling really bad about restarting the project; there were lots of neat things in the original! Bummer about all the clunky stuff, hmph.
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! Some Baba bugfixing and re-implementing things such as enemy behviour and editor tools in ESA 2. I’m starting to see some familiar patterns of aesthetical unpleasantness in ESA 2, and would very much like to deal with those right now so that I don’t have to keep developing the game with an increasing sense of not being a fan of the look of it. Hopefully something more concrete presents itself.
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.
Streamed again! I’ve been adding/fixing various things in Baba for consistency and to prepare for the eventual level editor. Today I polished a system that displays the above visual effect if the player would create a loop the game can’t resolve.
I also started working on the dialogue system of ESA2. That went surprisingly smoothly, I’m glad. I’ll try to go for a less rigid speech bubble -type design this time.
