Hempuli's blog

Lately I’ve been, unsurprisingly, really into working on Baba Is You, to the detriment of the progress on Snake Game and ESA 2. Today’s stream started with a new trap and a new type of moving platform being added to ESA along with a new room that showcases both, but soon afterwards I moved to Baba territory. Due to moving more things to lua lately Baba was in a somewhat buggy/crashy state but some really neat suggestions were thrown about and a bunch of bugs were fixed and features implemented, so that’s nice! I spent a bunch of time afterwards fixing said buggy/crashy behaviour in Baba, and apart from a couple more hairy issues things are looking pretty good! I’ll still have to figure out how exactly I’ll want to approach a “full” version of Baba, though.

(Cool photo & cool cake by my girlfriend, Anni :3)

Nordic Game Jam 2017 was last weekend, and I ended up winning it with my game, Baba Is You!

I went in not really expecting much; I wasn’t initially really in the mood for making new games so the plan was to kinda feel the situation and possibly just work on ESA 2 and/or Snake Game. The theme of the jam was “Not There”, and at some point it got me thinking about “not” as an operator in programming/logic. This in turn made me think of a puzzle game where the game logic is part of the game world, and eventually this idea turned into my entry. I was expecting to run to some really hairy coding problems and not be able to finish, but hey, that very much didn’t happen!

I’m not totally sure where to take the game from here; during the event my plan was to polish it a bit and release it mostly as-is, but since people really liked it and it even raised some philosophical considerations in some players, I think I’ll be working on it further.

Download the game on itch.io!

In other news, Environmental Station Alpha’s second anniversary was also last weekend, and I almost completely forgot to announce the sale that went with that. Oh well! Let’s hope we won’t get to its 3rd anniversary before ESA 2 is done.

Next up in the indie gamedev event schedule will be No More Sweden in June; we’ll see what happens there :O

Nordic Game Jam starts tomorrow! I really want to be able to show bits of ESA 2 and Snake Game there, so I spent today’s stream polishing some tiny bits of both. Thursday will be mostly quiet so I hope that I’ll be able to pull off some more polish in preparation for the actual event.

In ESA 2 I finally updated the double jump effect as well as the hookshot’s graphical look. Not 100% sure about the latter because of how “lasery” it looks, it almost feels as if this new hookshot should be able to be used offensively. Nevertheless, it’s an improvement. I’ll try to add some polish to certain early-game areas as well so that I could show off the beginning of the game without feeling that it’s way too work-in-progress.

In Snake Game I worked a bit on a cutscene/hub area that’ll be used for accessing the various encounters in the game. I needed to implement a ladder for said area, and to be honest the code for it is fairly hacky, but hopefully that won’t become a problem later on. I’ll try to get this area polished further before NGJ so that the player can somewhat seamlessly move from the main menu to the first encounter while learning controls on the way.

Today’s stream saw the addition of 1 new small room, beginnings of the tileset for the ~FINAL NON-OPTIONAL AREA~ and a new enemy for the previous area, seen above. The penultimate area is starting to feel pretty good apart from certain awkward room transitions, a missing bossfight and the general lack of background details that applies for almost the whole game at the moment. I’m going to have to spend a bunch of time decorating everything, eventually…

I’ll also have to redo the in-game map soon! I think I’ve talked about this before, but it’s nevertheless something I’ve been hesitating with because the current system has some really obscure code going on and picking that apart will probably be less than enjoyable.

Nordic Game Jam will be next week! I’m probably going and based on previous years it should be good fun. Not sure if I’ll get anything worthwhile done, though…

Today’s stream was fairly short & uneventful; I added a new small room to ESA 2, fixed some bugs and started working on the transition to the next area. Surprisingly Snake Game saw more development; I implemented a system where the player can enter their name when starting a new game. The system ended up being really hacky which will probably cause trouble for me at some point, but at least it works.

If the player can name the main character of a game, should they be able to add stuff like exclamation marks, numbers or dots to the name, or should the game force the name to be somewhat standard?

ITS NAME IS BLOCK THE TURTLE

THANK YOU ANNI