Hempuli's blog

During tonight’s stream I finished a level and added another, fixed some bugs and added a couple features in preparation for some endgame stuff along with adding a simple title screen in Baba Is You! :) I really should get that test build out soon because a lot of the content left to do is either endgame levels, other endgame stuff, polish or quality-of-life things that can technically wait for later (or can they???) Thanks a lot to the stream viewers for very helpful and kind comments :)

Today’s stream concentrated once again mostly on Baba Is You; a new word was added along with 3 new levels using said word, some colours were changed and I added more proper names for some levels. I ended up not naming all the levels on-stream since that would have spoiled them to some extent (although I’m not sure if anyone’s interested enough to check them out in more detail). I also added a new tutorial level + restructured the level map slightly.

In ESA 2 I added a little shortcut and a cutscene to go with it – there’s a lot of polish I’ve been thinking of, but I haven’t quite reached the level of motivation needed to pull off most of that. Nevertheless, this little addition was still better than nothing!!!

Baba Is You will probably need another art pass before being finished, but there’s only a little bit of stuff to add before I’m happy enough with it to let some testers have a go at the game. It’d be nice to be able to enter a stage where I’m not adding more content but polishing the existing stuff & adding quality-of-life things such as menus and whatnot sometime soon.

Finally painted a new fantasy watercolour piece! It’s been a year since I last did so; in the end the motivation came from my girlfriend. :) Black cardboard is good fun to work with, especially when using liquid watercolours. I guess the topic is somewhat generic but I’m very happy about the colours!

So yeah!! Today’s stream ended up being extra long and during it I ended up adding these props that I can put down where I want to liven up areas. They’ll be extremely helpful with more lush places because apparently it’s very hard (for me) to design an area with heavy vegetation in ESA 2’s tile system & colours. Getting these to work took way longer than I assumed + I ended up having to deal with some performance issues (albeit ones that turned out not to be caused by the newly-added props, or at least not entirely). I really hope I won’t have to spend much time optimizing things, but capsulehero told me some really simple and powerful quick optimizations which I think I’ll definitely be applying sometime soonish.

On top of this a new enemy was added & some adjustments were made, but the props were definitely the big thing of the stream; hopefully they’ll be worth it and not clash too badly with the rest of the art!