This week I officially started a Monday/Thursday streaming schedule; we’ll see how that goes. The first stream of this glorious new era was late but went fairly well. In ESA 2, I worked on boss-related basic functionality such as the boss HP bar, as well as some powerup/weapon-related systems. In Baba Is You, I trudged onwards on the nigh-endless road that hopefully leads us to a nice, functional level editor. Apart from the size-changing stuff, all buttons seen in the image above actually do what they’re meant to now, which is great!
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.
Today saw another stream! This time I managed to actually work a bit more diligently on ESA 2. I implemented a bunch of powerups and added powerup collection flags to all of the ones currently implemented, and worked a bit on the editor. One of my goals was to get editing the parallax layers working properly, but that turned out to be very very nasty so I left it for later.
I also worked a bit on Baba Is You; the “themes” as they’re called have been the object of interest for a bit now, and I continued making the work. I’m really proud of how handy the menu system of Baba’s is; my earlier games have had very clunky and manually-coded menus and Baba’s more dynamic affair makes the level editor *way* easier to structure. I shied away from the nastiest bit of theme work, though; hopefully it won’t take too long to get to that.
I streamed today, after a week or so of not getting much done game development-wise. Phew! Baba got some work done on the editor; it’s coming together and even though there’s still lots to do, I realized that I’m possibly closer to being done than I previously thought. That’s encouraging!
On ESA 2’s side, I worked further on making the level editor work in a zoomed-in mode, to make dealing with small tiles nicer. I also shrunk the in-game font and HUD elements to have them not fill the game window as much. All in all, small things but progress nonetheless!
The image above is pretty terrible, all things considered, but I’m feeling a bit more hopeful about the future of ESA 2 at this point. I decided to turn back to 8×8 tiling again, after years of work with 12×12 tiling; this’ll hopefully make progress faster (once I figure the colours out) and help alleviate my disappointment with the visual style of the game. Now just to get everything working on this new, lower resolution, and we should be good to go ahead (finally!)
Welcome to the new year! I have some hopefully exciting plans regarding this year; I’ll announce those as they become relevant. For now, work on Baba’s editor has continued at a slowish pace and that’s pretty much it. I’ve added line, rectangle & flood fill tools, implemented some very important underlying systems and in general tried to finally get onwards from the object list system; it affects the codebase very heavily so implementing it neatly is very important, but it’s hard to have the patience to actually go through with that neatness.
Baba was nominated in a bunch of awards at the end of last year, including The Game Awards & Golden Joystick awards. Disco Elysium and Outer Wilds took the prizes, but I don’t mind too much because both seem to be really unique and amazing games. (I wouldn’t entirely mind some awards, though.)
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!!
