Hempuli's blog

I hadn’t slept much last night so I was extremely tired at the beginning of the stream. However I managed to persevere, and as a prize for that I got some of Baba’s map stuff actually working! There’s a lot of polish to be added and big features still missing, but I think I have a good idea of in which direction I want to go with the visual design here. I also managed to re-implement the old map in the new map system, which is good for getting a new playable build out.

What worries me somewhat is that there’s some kind of a bug in the level editor; after a while of using it the game either crashes or something stops working. My guess is that I’ve accidentally forgotten to take some tiny lua thing into account and it then accumulates until problems arise, but as with the previous “nothing-works” bug, it’s always annoying to debug something that only happens after a while of playing.

Today’s stream was spent mostly on updating Baba’s levels into a new format; I had changed the positions of the various objects in the editor’s “reference map”, so to say, so all the levels were just randomish garbage. I had planned to re-do all the levels by hand but talking about it aloud on-stream made me realize that coding a conversion tool would probably be easier. And so it was! Converting all the levels + adding their names back still took a lot of time, phew. I also started implementing the game’s map again; I’m still missing some features to make the map to my liking so for now I’ll just recreate the old map in order to make sure that I have a fully working version of the game handy when needed. I’d say I need one more stream to be at the point where I have the game fully working again, with some jank here and there. After that it’s just a matter of adding the new map features in order to make the whole system work in the way I want.

In other news, I’ve been super into markov chains again and recently revisited my old generator, this time redoing it from scratch with the generation now being done a letter-by-letter level instead of word-by-word. The results are really promising and I’ve had fun generating texts from a public domain cookbook & the script of The Two Towers:

In fact, this stuff has been so much fun that I finally started a twitter account that I can use to share generated texts I find amusing. It’s called @chaingenerator.

Oh yeah, even more editor stuff. Getting close to having all the basic functionality I need in, though! The new editor and its related systems have now fully overtaken the old map & editor screens, although there’s still a bunch of missing functionality (namely beating levels returning the player back to the map & unlocking levels). I think I have a plan for how the general map-unlocking and -traversal loop will work, so I’ll probably be implementing things related to that on the side. There’re also some quality-of-life tools that are dearly needed in the editor, especially when it comes to editing world maps, but they shouldn’t cause too much trouble once I actually get around to doing them.

I made a really funny level during today’s stream; I’ll try to sit on it until the next Screenshot Saturday! :)

Got one stream & update off my list! 2 to go. Today’s stream also concentrated on getting Baba’s level editor done, and I’d say it was also very productive! I’ve left the visuals of the UI elements pretty rough because implementing a nice look for them is going to be tedious and hopefully something that can be done later; however, the actual functionality of everything seems surprisingly robust! Lua is of enormous help here, as usual, because with it I need way less workarounds and menu-specific hacks. I’m hoping that sometime next week I’ll have the editor at a state where it can overtake the original level/map system fully.

I’ve been slowly working on Baba’s new, user-friendly editor (and missing updates; I’m behind by 3 at this point!) I started this process now in order to get certain functionality in that I’ll need for my own stuff but that’d require quite a lot of work to implement even in an ad-hoc debug-style editor. There’s one large feature missing but after that I’m about at the point where I can use this new editor for what I originally needed it for; of course after that there’s still a gigantic amount of general polish and feature creep to be done to get it to a point where I can present it to players, haha :D

During today’s stream I got those neat little preview images working as well as implementing a system for menu buttons. Also lots of smaller bugfixes to how the editor works. There’s a high temptation to do things in a hacky, just-get-it-to-work way, but at this point I’m really happy that I’ve taken the time to make things a bit more modular; saves a lot of pain.